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, François, 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
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Krista
 Contents

Introduction ix

Chronology xiii

Abbreviations xv

Alphabetical List of Entries xvii

Topical List of Entries xxi

The Encyclopedia 1

Selected Bibliography 267

Index 273

About the Contributors 285

 Introduction

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

with the Renaissance physician’s fiction. Not only would the project be gargantuan if
every name, theme, rhetorical device, and learned reference in the Five Books of Pan-
tagruel were included, but the sheer hubris of attempting to catalog the “living waters”
(3BK prol.—see Abbreviations) of this self-styled alchemist’s cauldron seems worthy of
Rabelais’s trickster, Panurge, or even the fool Triboullet. The Pantagrueline tales are
themselves encyclopedic, not just in the hyperbolic curriculum that Gargantua sets forth
for his son (P 8), urging him to become an “abyss” of knowledge, but also in the
compendium of allusions to navigation, theology, music, art and architecture, philosophy,
medicine, and other disciplines that Rabelais amasses in his magnum opus. His interests
and areas of expertise are vast, in keeping with the ideal of the uomo universale or
Renaissance Man; one goal of this volume is to showcase the fascinating array of topics
that are grafted onto the mock-epic framework of the chronicles, transforming them into
a richly textured tapestry of life in the sixteenth century.
Some would argue that this richness is a double-edged sword: not only a treasure trove
of laughter, mind teasers, mock-epic hijinks, and insights into the French Renaissance,
Rabelais’s hybrid and multifaceted discourse also offers a host of lexical and interpretive
challenges. For readers accustomed to well-defined genres, classically crafted plots, and
transparent meanings, the hodgepodge of ingredients that make up Rabelais’s fiction,
ranging from genealogies, lists, and a library catalog to surrealistic battle narratives, a
flying pig, and the chatter of drunks, can at times be overwhelming. True, works of
fantasy requiring leaps of logic and a suspension of disbelief abound in modern culture,
as evidenced by the enormous popularity in film and fiction of Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings, a saga often likened to Rabelais’s magnum opus for its epic proportions and
inspiration, or even the Harry Potter books, similar to Rabelais’s earliest chronicles in
their focus on children, games, education, and magic. Adding more fuel to the narrator’s
claim that Pantagruel is “incomparable” (prol.), however, these modern works of fantasy
lack the verbal prolixity, rapid shifts in tonality, and distinctive blend of high and low
culture, scatology and learned references, piety and irreverence that keeps readers off
balance in Rabelais.
Not accidentally, given the risk of arrest and execution that faced humanists in Ren-
aissance France who were too outspoken, Rabelais’s encyclopedic text is itself a literary
shape shifter, at least from the reader’s standpoint. Depending on our familiarity with
Rabelais’s learned allusions, the particular thematic threads we follow as we navigate his
prose, and the critical apparatus or perspective we bring to the interpretive process, the
unstable admixture of ingredients he includes in the crucible of his fiction seem to com-
bine and recombine in a host of different patterns, which vary from one reader or reading
to the next. The result is a Rabelais who is many things to many people: both a “mad
dog” and a “refined genius”; a good Catholic, an Evangelical, and an atheist; a misogynist
and a closet feminist.
x Introduction

At least to some degree, Rabelais foresaw and orchestrated this plural response to his
chronicles. In addition to being a literary pack rat, whose cornucopian text overflows
with marketplace invective, scatology, riddles, and classical references, Rabelais also
dabbles in verbal magic, offering us a polysemic work that he likens to a bottomless
barrel: replicating the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the Gallic physician intentionally
fashions an interpretive wellspring so rich in conundra, multiple entendres, polyvalent
symbols, and connections between episodes that the “joyeuseté et raillerie” (3BK prol.)
never run dry. Suspending us between the positivistic lure of hidden messages about
“religion,” “politics,” and “economics” (G prol.) on the one hand, and hints, on the other
hand, that his text is purely ludic and has no meaning, Rabelais beckons and eludes us
at the same time, whether we are first-time readers or longtime aficionados of his work.
Like any complex varietal, Rabelais’s overflowing wine cask brings the reader back
for repeated tastes: but while his text’s complexity makes the work mesmerizing, at least
for those willing to linger and “gnaw the marrowbone” (G prol.) or look beneath the
surface of his fiction, his chronicles also resist the neatly circumscribed categories, au-
thoritative definitions, and claims to comprehensiveness that we often associate with
encyclopedias. To borrow a metaphor from Rabelais himself, one might just as easily
paint the “Ideas of Plato,” the “Atoms of Epicurus,” or even the invisible Echo (4BK
2). Despite the host of containers he invokes as metaphors for his book, including a box,
bone, cask, and bottle, the Gallic physician’s ideas, imagery, themes, style, and verve
can by no means be summed up “in a nutshell.”
By the same token, few texts cry out for an encyclopedia or dictionary as the Panta-
grueline tales do. Rabelais is a notoriously challenging author, especially for those who
read him in English translations without extensive footnotes to help them navigate his
“motz epaves” or “strange and unusual” words (P 6). And while he resists our efforts to
pin him down, we might recall that his own Fourth Book is accompanied in some editions
by a dictionary of sorts, the Brief Declaration. Although the authorship of this glossary,
which may or may not be in the Gallic physician’s own hand, is questionable, its very
existence acknowledges the difficulty of his chronicles and lays the groundwork for future
reference works designed to make his world more accessible. It is probable, of course,
that one function of the author’s verbal roadblocks is to exclude the “hypocrites” (“ca-
gotz”) and “humbugs” (“caphars” [GP 247; P prol.]) bent on censuring him. Yet Rabelais
himself seems to encourage, both in his marrowbone analogy and through his own use
of dialogic processes, any type of exercise, dialogue, or discussion that promotes under-
standing: “When did it ever hurt,” asks Pantagruel during the Third Book, when Panurge
balks at consulting a sibyl, “to keep acquiring knowledge, whether from a sot, a pot, a
bottle, a feather, or shoe leather?” (GP 285; 3BK 16). By putting our heads together, he
implies, and weighing perspectives other than our own, we increase the probability of
learning and growing.
This volume, a compilation of readings by more than seventy contributors, is based
on a similar premise: that our own understanding of Rabelais will be enhanced if we
pool our resources and approach his text dialogically. Although this dictionary may not
solve every riddle, explain every unfamiliar word, or settle all the controversies surround-
ing Rabelais’s work, it is intended to furnish general readers with both a basic historical
framework that will allow them to appreciate the Gallic physician’s fiction within the
context of sixteenth-century France; and with several hundred articles, contributed by
scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives and methodologies, on selected
characters, episodes, and textual references in Rabelais. Far from offering either a com-
plete Rabelais concordance or a single, definitive interpretation of any individual episode,
the goal of the volume is to open the Gallic physician’s world to new readers, provide
 Introduction xi

a forum for differing approaches to the chronicles, trigger new debate among veteran
readers, and serve as an informational resource for students and teachers of his work.
Of all the goals represented here, the first may be the most critical: to help realize
Rabelais’s own hope, expressed in the prologue to Pantagruel, that even if “we forgot
the art of printing, or all the books in the world were destroyed,” his chronicles would
“forever and forever” be passed “down from hand to hand” (GP 133). Despite the pri-
macy of electronic texts and cyberspace learning in our own era, of course, Rabelais
continues to be read by new generations of students, suggesting that our concern about
the future of his text is oddly placed. After all, excellent editions of his opus abound in
France, including the recent 1994 Pleiade offering edited by Mireille Huchon (Gallimard
1994); the Livre de Poche version (1994) edited by Jean Céard, Gérard Defaux, and
Michel Simonin; and the highly regarded critical editions of Pantagruel (1959), Gar-
gantua (1970), the Third Book (1964), and the Fourth Book (1947) in the Textes Littér-
aires Français series, edited by Verdun Saulnier, Ruth Calder, M. A. Screech, and Robert
Marichal, respectively. In English, moreover, translations of his mock epic are relatively
plentiful and easy to obtain: versions by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (En-
cyclopedia Britannica “Great Books” 1955), Jacques LeClercq (Everyman’s Library:
Random House), John Michael Cohen (Penguin Classics 1955), Donald Frame (Univer-
sity of California 1991), and Burton Raffel (W.W. Norton 1990) are currently in print;
and while they may not appear among the holdings of all public libraries, the volumes
are readily accessible at university libraries and through major booksellers. Although
each of these translations—ranging from the archaic but poetic English of Urquhart to
LeClercq’s flavorful attempt to capture Rabelais’s word play, Cohen’s more direct trans-
lation, and Frame and Raffel’s renderings of the text in Americanized English—has its
strengths and weaknesses, all are generally faithful. Even more dramatically, Internet
access to electronic versions of the Rabelaisian chronicles is readily available in both
French and English thanks to the Gutenberg Project, Athena, and the Great Books col-
lection.
When we speak of making Rabelais’s works accessible, then, something more than
mere “availability” is at stake. To borrow a metaphor from the Frozen Words episode,
where cries from a naval battle months earlier are miraculously reconstituted, it is a
question of “thawing” the chronicles, of bridging the distance between Rabelais’s world
and our own. Constructing his text as a “source vive” or living monument, the author
urges readers to approach his wine barrel or banquet not in the manner of “graveyard
ghouls” (GP 247; 3BK prol.) who censor, plunder, and deaden works of literature, but
rather as fellow tipplers willing to linger over his banquet, let the wine breathe, and savor
its full body and complexity. Thus, while the length constraints of this volume require
the simplification of topics that merit much richer treatment, its overall goal is not to
reduce the play of signifiers or strip the text of its life: on the contrary, the aim is to
help perpetuate the Rabelaisian colloquium, not just by encouraging readers to revisit the
text and reflect on its paradoxes and challenges, but also by renewing dialogue on its
controversies, and by providing suggestions for further reading about Rabelais and his
world.
In terms of its organization, this Encyclopedia offers an alphabetized collection of
short articles on selected topics pertaining to Rabelais: on literary and philosophical
movements, characters and episodes in his text, political and religious figures from his
era, Renaissance and classical authors with whom he shares similarities, and on related
cultural manifestations of the Renaissance, such as art and architecture, music, and print-
ing. Particularly to assist those who might otherwise be perplexed by the interpretive
differences of opinion in this volume, there are also entries on the major movements in
xii Introduction

Rabelais criticism, which provide an overview on traditional and more recent approaches
to his text. Although as many terms as possible are alphabetized under the English version
of their name, with the original French in parentheses, to facilitate the access of English
speakers to his text, episodes and characters whose names vary significantly from one
English translation to the next remain in French. For readers unfamiliar with the French
text of Rabelais or, alternatively, with terminology used in its English translations, an
extensive set of cross references in both languages and a comprehensive index at the end
of the volume will allow readers to locate items more easily. As for quotations of Rabelais
in this reference work, those in French are consistent with the text established by Mireille
Huchon in the 1994 Pléiade edition of the Oeuvres complètes; and the English translations
provided, unless otherwise indicated, are those of the contributors and editor. As noted
in the text, translations not furnished by the authors are most often taken from Burton
Raffel’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. In instances where the spellings used are inconsis-
tent, this typically stems from Rabelais’s own fluid orthography, a tendency that is com-
mon among French humanists of the sixteenth century.
Finally, a number of important terms, episodes, and characters in the Pantagrueline
Tales receive less attention than they deserve in this volume, and some necessarily go
untreated, not because they are without interest, but because the material is so vast that
only selected topics could be accommodated. Particularly in the case of the Fifth Book,
whose authenticity is disputed, the number of entries is quite limited: but for those who
wish additional information, either on the Cinquiesme livre or on other books in the
Pantagrueline chronicles, we have included numerous suggestions for further reading.
Indeed, this volume should be viewed not as an end in itself, but rather as the stimulus
for a more in-depth investigation of Rabelais, his chronicles, and his times.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has participated in this
project. A word of thanks, first of all, to the extraordinarily diverse range of rabelaisants
who were willing to share their talents, knowledge, and expertise, many of them on very
short notice. What began as a project firmly rooted in the United States, purely for reasons
of practicality, has crossed oceans and bridged generations of scholars, not unlike the
Rabelaisian text itself: to all of these colleagues, ranging from veteran Pantagruelistes,
whose enthusiasm for Rabelais has not waned in “retirement,” to young scholars who
combine flawless erudition with new critical approaches, and to those in midcareer as
well, who so graciously agreed to make time for this project when they had none to
spare, I am most grateful. Thanks are due as well to Dr. George Butler at Greenwood
Press, who first broached the idea of this reference work, for his continued assistance
and immense patience; and for his guidance and support in bringing this project, unfin-
ished though it may be, to its conclusion. To my family, finally, there is no need for
words—instead, let us toast the journey’s end, savor the marrowbone, and enjoy the
banquet!

Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

 Chronology

c. 1483–94 François Rabelais, the fourth son of a successful lawyer named Antoine, is born at La
Devinière 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 Budé.
1521 Sends a second letter to Budé, 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 François 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. François makes his second trip to Rome with Jean du Bellay,
who is appointed to the College of Cardinals in May. Rabelais’s son Théodule 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, François 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’Orléans, 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 Devinière
BHR Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance
CI Critical Inquiry
CL Comparative Literature
CLS Comparative Literature Studies
EC Esprit créateur
ER Études 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 études rabelaisiennes
RHLF Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France
RHR Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance
RN Romance Notes
RQ Renaissance Quarterly
RR Romanic Review
SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal
SEDES Société d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur
SF Studi Francesi
THR Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance
TLF Textes littéraires français
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 complètes, 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-à-l’âne
Asclepiades Cornucopia
Astrology Correspondence
Bacbuc Couillatris (4BK prol.)
Badebec Critical Theory
Baisecul and Humevesne Cuckoldry, fear of
Bakhtin, Mikhail Death, treatment of
Basché (4BK 12–15) Debt or Debtors, praise of (3BK 2–5)
Béda, Noël Decretals (Les Décrétales) (4BK 48–54)
Body, representations of Des Périers, Bonaventure
Bottle, Divine or Holy (Dive Bouteille) Devils and Demonology
Briçonnet, Guillaume Dindenault (4BK 5–6)
Bridoye Diogenes the Cynic
Brief Declaration (Briefve Déclaration) Dipsodes
Bringuenarilles (4BK 17) Disciple of Pantagruel (Le Disciple de Pantagruel)
Budé, 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 Haughty Parisian Lady (Haulte Dame de Paris)

Education (P 21–22)
Emblems Hebrew Language and Culture, references to
Encyclopedism Hell, depiction of
England Henry II
Enigmatic Prophecy (Énigme en Prophétie) (G 58) Her Trippa
Ennasin, or Island of the Alliances (4BK 9) Heresy
Epistémon Hero
Erasmus, Desiderius Héroët, Antoine
Eudémon Hieroglyphs
Eulogy, Satirical (Éloge Paradoxal) Hippocrates
Evangelism Hippothadée (3BK 30)
Fanfreluches Antidotées Homenaz (4BK 49–54)
Farce, elements of Homer
Fezandat, Michel Hôtel-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 (François) I Italy
Frère Jean (Frère Jan, Friar John, Brother John) Janotus de Bragmardo
Friendship Jews
Frozen Words (Paroles Gelées) (4BK 55–56) Judiciary
Galen Juste, François
Games Kabbala (Cabala, Qabbalah)
Ganabin (4BK 66–67) Knowledge
Gargamelle Language
Gargantua Lanternois
Gargantua Law
Gargantuan Chronicles (Chroniques Gargantuines) Lefèvre 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, Niccolò
Grandgousier Macreons
Gross Medlars (P 1) Macrobe
Grotesque Realism Major (Maioris, Mair), John
 Alphabetical List of Entries xix

Mardigras Plague
Marguerite de Navarre Pliny, the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus)
Marot, Clément 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 Sophists
17–18, 1534) Sorbonne
xx Alphabetical List of Entries

Sporades Travel Literature

Symbolic System Trent, Council of
Syphilis (La Vérole) 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
Tempête, Pierre Utopia
Thalamège Villon, François
Thaumaste (P 18–20) Violence
Thélème, Abbey of (Abbaye de Thélème) Virgil
Thenaud, Jean Voyage
Third Book (Tiers Livre) Warfare
Thirst Wechel, Chrétien
Tiraqueau, André 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
Basché Sibyl
Bridoye Sophists
Bringuenarilles
Chicanous Episodes
Couillatris Andouilles
Dindenault Baisecul and Humevesne
Dipsodes Bridoye
Ecolier Limousin Bringuenarilles
Epistémon Chaneph
Eudémon Cheli
Gargamelle Chicanous
Gargantua Debts or Debtors, praise of
Gastrolastres Dindenault
Giants Ecolier Limousin
Grandgousier Enigmatic Prophecy
Her Trippa Ennasin
Hippothadée Frozen Words
Homenaz Ganabin
Janotus de Bragmardo Gastrolastres
Lanternois Gross Medlars
Loup Garou Haughty Parisian Lady
Macreons Her Trippa
Macrobe Hippothadée
Mardigras Homenaz
Mercury Janotus de Bragmardo
xxii Topical List of Entries

Lanternois Héroët
Medamothi Hippocrates
Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s Homer
Pan, death of Juste
Pantagruelion Lefèvre 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
Thélème Pliny the Elder
Plotinus
Historical Figures Queneau
Aristotle Quintilian
Asclepiades Ramus
Béda Ronsard
Briçonnet Saint-Gelais
Budé Shakespeare
Calvin Tahureau
Cartier Tartareti
Castiglione Tempête
Cervantes Thenaud
Charles V Tiraqueau
Colonna Triboullet
Des Périers 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-à-l’âne
Francis I Cornucopia
Galen Encyclopedism
Henry II Eulogy, satirical
 Topical List of Entries xxiii

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
xxiv Topical List of Entries

Charity Medicine
Community, portrayal of Asclepiades
Cuckoldry Galen
Death Hippocrates
Debts or Debtors Hôtel-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 xxv

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
Béda Charles V
Briçonnet Community, portrayal of
Budé 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 Thalamège
Turks Thélème
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
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 NET-
TESHEIM (1486–1535) One of the most elu-
sive figures of the Renaissance, Henry Cornelius
Agrippa of Nettesheim (Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa von Nettesheim), a magus and skeptic
philosopher born near Cologne, is chiefly asso-
ciated by Rabelais scholars with Her Trippa, the
comic astrologer and cuckold in the Third Book
(3BK 25). The name of Her Trippa may in fact
be an amalgam of Agrippa and Trithemius, a
German occultist to whom Agrippa dedicated his
Of Occult Philosophy (De occulta philosophia
[1533]). Although the fictive character bears little
likeness to the real Agrippa, nearly all the divi-
nation methods with the aid of which Her Trippa
predicts that Panurge will be cuckolded, robbed,
and beaten by his future wife are listed in
Agrippa’s Of Occult Philosophy, a compendium
of Renaissance magic and occult sciences, and in
his equally well-known On the Vanity and Un-
certainty of Arts and Sciences (De incertitudine
et vanitate scientiarum et artium [1526]), a dec-
lamation denouncing all worldly wisdom. As
well as being an attack on the occult philosophy
of the magus, the unsympathetic portrayal of Her
Trippa could equally be seen as a rejection of
Agrippa’s support of love marriages—explicitly
denounced by Gargantua (3BK 48)—in Dec-
lamation on the Sacrament of Marriage (De sa-
cramento matrimonii declamatio [1526]).
Agrippa’s On the Nobility and Preeminence of
the Female Sex (De nobilitate et praecellentia
foeminei sexus [1529]) is also linked to the theme
of marriage and women in the Third Book. Ref-
erences to Agrippa’s works abound in the Third
Book, and Abel Lefranc claims that the two men,
both free thinkers who had sympathies for re-
formed ideas, may have met in Lyon or in Gre-
noble, when both took refuge from persecution
in François de Vachon’s household.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges.
L’insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva: Droz,
1977); Abel Lefranc, “Rabelais et Cornelius Agrippa,”
Mélanges offerts à M. Emile Picot (Paris: Librairie Da-
mascène Morgand, 1913); Charles Nauert, Agrippa
and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1965).
Agnieszka Steczowicz
ALCHEMY The pseudoscience of transform-
ing base metals into gold or other riches. Even
without evidence from the body of his work, we
can be relatively certain that Rabelais would
have been familiar with the practices of alchemy.
The process of extracting a precious substance
through the repeated heating and distilling of or-
dinary matter had been of interest since antiquity.
From ancient and Hellenic Greece through the
Islamic enlightenment a large body of technical
manuals, philosophical treatises, and occult lore
concerned with alchemy had passed into the six-
teenth century. By this time the practice had also
come under the influence of Christian Neopla-
tonism and had become associated with the re-
demption of fallen matter and transubstantiation.
Alchemy offered the promise of producing a fifth
essence, or quintessence, in the form of a pre-
cious metal or a life-giving elixir known as the
philosopher’s stone (pharmakon athanasias). Al-
though judging by satirical accounts of Chaucer,
Erasmus, Jonson, and others, one can surmise
that alchemy attracted charlatans who would prey
on gullible victims in search of a short cut to
wealth or longevity, the techniques of alchemical
transformation were, nevertheless, evolving in
the sixteenth century into the modern practices
of pharmaceutical medicine. Distilled substances
were thought to provide more effective medicinal
remedies than the more natural material medica
catalogued in medieval herbals. Rabelais would
2 Alcofrybas Nasier
have been familiar not only with the humbug of
alchemy but through his medical training, with
its legitimate possibilities.
References to alchemy are scattered through-
out the Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel
and appear in a variety of settings. In Book 5,
Pantagruel and Panurge arrive in a land of al-
chemy, the Kingdom of Quintessence or Land of
the Fifth Essence, and encounter a group of royal
abstractors. Some are drawing water from pum-
ice by pounding it in a marble mortar. A spodi-
zateur or metal oxidizer is extracting “farts from
a dead monkey” (GP 5BK 22; OC 5BK 23), and
Panurge becomes physically ill upon observing
another “putrefying a great potful of human urine
with horse dung” into a “sacred distillation” (GP
5BK 22; OC 5BK 23). Something of the same
mocking attitude is expressed through Panurge’s
extended justification for borrowing and spend-
ing in Book 3. Panurge argues that the human
body is a microcosm of an economic system
based upon credit borrowing and is analogous to
an alchemical furnace (see Debts or Debtors,
Praise of). In the human body base matter is
transmuted into blood, a restorative even greater
than any known by the alchemist, which in turn
lends itself to all parts of the body in order to
sustain life. Panurge incorporates the specious
arts of alchemy into his own specious justifica-
tion for self-indulgence. Moreover, the argument
is itself a parody of the alchemical model of the
universe in which microcosms form a complex
system of analogies (see Imitation and Parody).
Rabelais’s attitude is less clear, however, when
he offers alchemy as a metaphor for the produc-
tion of his own text. On the title page of both
Gargantua and Pantagruel and the end page of
Pantagruel, Rabelais refers to his persona, M.
Alcofrybas, as the “abstractor of the fifth es-
sence.” This suggests that the text is the end
product of an alchemical distillation. This im-
plicit claim is elaborated upon in the prologue to
Gargantua. The narrator compares his work to
a Silenus Box in which are contained “fine
drugs” which one might find in an apothecary’s
shop and which will cure digestion and provide
bodily comfort (see Sileni). In short, this text
possesses the curative powers of the philoso-
pher’s stone. The seriousness of this metaphor,
however, is undermined by the voice of this car-
nival barker hawking the text in the hyperbolic
language of the marketplace. Our uneasiness
over these claims is strengthened in the final
chapter of Pantagruel. The narrator asserts that
one should read his text for “mere amusement”
and nothing else. Bad readers are compared to
those who “rake through” the excrement of chil-
dren searching for the pit of a digested cherry so
that it might be distilled into “pomander oil.” If
one were searching for some magical panacea,
some nugget of truth hidden beneath the surface
of the narrative and revealed through exegetical
distillation, Rabelais would seem to suggest that
one would not find it here. “Never trust in men,”
he concludes, “who peer from under a cowl,” be
they academics, evangelists, or alchemists.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Carl G. Jung, Psychology
and Alchemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1968); Douglas McFarland, “Rabelais and Al-
chemy,” Rabelais in Context (Birmingham: Summa,
1993); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to
Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance
(New York: Karger, 1982).
Douglas McFarland
ALCOFRYBAS (ALCOFRIBAS) NASIER
The first two of Rabelais’s five books were pub-
lished under the pseudonym of Alcofrybas Na-
sier. This anagram of François Rabelais was
wonderfully well suited to the character of the
works, with its combined suggestions of mysti-
fication and broad humor. The first syllable, Al-,
suggests a derivation from Arabic and hence a
deep knowledge of science, while “fry” and
“bas” have much more homely associations (fry-
ing, lowness). Nasier suggests noses (Latin na-
sus), a traditional subject for humor.
Maistre Alcofrybas first presents himself to us
(P prol.) as a trusted retainer of the Grandgou-
sier/Gargantua/Pantagruel royal family. He is
a kind of tame scholar, family historian, or
praise-singer: sometimes he describes events as
an eyewitness, and at others he cites written his-
tory, family documents, folk tales, or even ar-
chaeological remains as his sources. Rabelais
cheerfully defies consistent chronology, since
each generation of giants lives several hundred
years, but Alcofrybas, a human being, manages
to have known them all (for example, to have

acquired inside information from Gargantua’s
nursemaids). On the title page of the second edi-
tion of Gargantua, the work is ascribed to
“l’abstracteur de quinte essence,” a phrase nor-
mally meaning an alchemist, and later title pages
make reference to “Maistre Alcofribas, abstrac-
teur de quinte essence,” but we do not see him
engage in any alchemical pursuits in the actual
story.
His function is to be a highly visible narrator,
to engage in imaginary disputes with the readers
(always imagined as a merry group of listeners),
and to provide ostensible evidence for the verac-
ity of the story. His language is a rich mixture
of learned, popular, and vulgar elements, with
recurring emphasis on wine and drinking.
On the title pages of the later books he is re-
placed by Maistre François Rabelais, but the
style of this new narrator, particularly in the pro-
logues, shares many features with that of Alcof-
rybas.
Readings: Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A
Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1971); Gérard Defaux, “So-
phista loquitur: Rabelais et son masque comique,” ER
11 (1974): 89–135; Pierre-Paul Plan, Bibliographie ra-
belaisienne: les éditions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904).
Carol Clark
ALLEGORY The Renaissance inherited three
basic types of allegory from the Middle Ages.
First, the extended metaphor, such as Pilgrim’s
Progress or Le Roman de la Rose, consists of a
story (fabula) that represents another order of
meaning. For example, Guillaume de Lorris’s
Garden represents the attributes of his lady’s
beauty, and the Rose, her love, while Mr. Chris-
tian’s journey enacts the passage of the Christian
through life to salvation. Rabelais’s giants and
the multitude of symbols in his chronicles cor-
respond to this type.
Second, there is the exegetical allegory, de-
vised as an instrument to interpret the Bible. The
story (historia) is subjected to three or more in-
terpretative processes: allegory, or doctrinal ex-
tensions (quid credas—what you believe); tro-
pology, or moral considerations (quid agas—
what you do); and anagogy, the implications of
the story for salvation (quo tendas—where you
Allegory 3
are heading). Rabelais indicates in the prologue
to Gargantua that this type of allegory is appli-
cable to his chronicles; and in the Third Book
prologue he hints that his wine is “living water”
like the Bible and that his works are to be inter-
preted in like manner.
The third traditional type of allegory is prefig-
uration, consisting of words and acts in the Old
Testament which, according to Christian theol-
ogy, prefigure the coming of Christ. From this
perspective, Moses leading the Israelites across
the Red Sea prefigures the action of Jesus in re-
deeming humanity. In Rabelais, the incidents of
the fabula look back in the person of the replicate
Christ, Pantagruel, to the acts of Jesus, partic-
ularly the forgiving of Panurge’s debts/sins
(3BK 5), the surviving of a storm (4BK 18–24),
and the overcoming of death (4BK 34). Rabe-
lais’s chronicles also look forward to the Second
Coming and the transcendence of humanity (e.g.,
the evocation of Armageddon in Gargantua and
the concatenation of marriages which signals the
Second Coming after the Bottle episode in the
Fifth Book).
To the aforementioned systems Rabelais adds
two more hierarchies implicit in the allegorical
tradition, the first of which is a movement from
the particular to the general: for example, in Gar-
gantua the Abbey of Seuilly is a part of Rabe-
lais’s environment in the fabula; at a higher level
of significance (allegory and tropology) the at-
tack on the Abbey represents the Sack of Rome
as indicated by the reference to the plague (G
45); and at the highest level (anagogy) the Abbey
is the Church on earth, assailed by the forces of
evil. The second system extension is Neoplatonic
and is based on the theory of emanation and re-
turn. (See Neoplatonism.) It is essential to an
understanding of the Third Book, the Fourth
Book, and the Divine Bottle episode in the Fifth
Book, followed by the return of the companions.
Within this system, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty
stream from the Divine and are replicated at the
levels of Intellect, Soul, and Matter, at each level
retaining the characteristics of the level above but
diminished until at the level of Matter the qual-
ities of the source are almost lost. This outward
movement is mirrored in an urge to return in love
up the stages of the emanation until fused back
into the Divine from which all derived. Human-
4 Allegory
ity, caught in the toils of Matter, is too self-
preoccupied to heed the longing for union with
the Divine unless started from its lethargy by one
of the four Frenzies: Madness (Triboullet [3BK
37–38, 45–46]), Drunkenness (Rabelais’s theme
of wine), Prophecy (e.g., the Sibyl, [3BK 16–
18]), and Love (cf. the marriage theme).
Rabelais’s chronicles are a virtuoso display of
allegorization. From Gargantua on, all episodes
contain a mixture of all these types, creating a
multilayered text carrying multiple meanings si-
multaneously. Often one level of text is paradox-
ically opposed to another. A relatively simple ex-
ample is the pilgrim episode in Gargantua (38,
45). At story level, the pilgrims are mistaken for
snails by Gargantua and eaten; they escape by
means of their staves but are nearly washed away
by the giant’s piss, following which they are
snared in nets, captured by Picrochole’s rabble,
and freed by Frère Jean who brings them into
the giant’s household. They are given a good ser-
mon by Grandgousier and sent on their way on
horseback with provisions for their journey.
Reform commonplaces—such as the literal
exegesis of Psalms which the story seems con-
trived to expose, superstition about saints, and
the uselessness of pilgrimages—are garnered
from the allegorical (doctrinal) and tropological
(moral) levels. But the pilgrims’ naı̈ve attitude to
the Bible, which is ridiculed at the lower levels,
is affirmed and praised in the anagogy (pertain-
ing to salvation). The ignorance of these com-
mon folk exposes them to grave dangers in the
encounter with the new Church (Gargantua), but
they are saved and healed by their pilgrim’s
staves (bourdons), that is, by their faith. By their
faith they are saved from the consequences of
their ignorance or the river of piss, brought into
the communion of the true Church, and sent on
their way rejoicing.
Allegory has three principal purposes: to goad
the sincere searcher to penetrate below the sur-
face of the text, to exclude those who are un-
worthy from that same kernel of significance (see
the exclusions from Thélème and in the prologue
to the Third Book), and to give delight in the
solving of riddles. Paradoxes are frequent in Ra-
belais’s chronicles and a key tool in their deci-
pherment. To state the paradox is the first step to
solving the enigma. For example one of the keys
to Books 3, 4, and 5 is the paradox that marriage
is problematical for Panurge and proper for Pan-
tagruel.
Numerous signs point to the presence of alle-
gory. For example, the walls of Paris, constituted
of human genitalia (P 15), are revoltingly ob-
scene until it is noted that minds and ideas and
the interaction between them are a better defense
of what Paris stands for than inert stone. Simi-
larly, the brutal butchery effected by Frère Jean
at Seuilly is morally unacceptable. But when
seen as the unremitting combat waged against
evil by the Church, armed with a symbolic cross
and braquemard representing the “Sword of the
Spirit” or the Word of God, it becomes appro-
priate. The exegetical tradition within which Ra-
belais has chosen to create his text has rules to
guide the interpreter. Clear passages are used to
interpret difficult ones; Rabelais guides us to key
passages by small clues, which are often remote
from the episode they reveal: “Du passé je vous
délivre” (“I free you from your past” [3BK 5])
signals Pantagruel’s status as a replicate Christ;
the Y of 3BK 26 explains Pantagruel’s bizarre
naval strategy in 4BK 34; and the two appear-
ances of Gargantua’s little dog in the Third Book
direct the reader to the Book of Tobit, which de-
scribes the program of the Fourth and Fifth
Books. A triangle links the condemnation of fac-
tionalism in the 4BK Prologue 2 with the empty
words of the Island of Ennasin (4BK 9), the
death of the Physetere (4BK 34) and the Frozen
Words episode (4BK 55–56), inviting the atten-
tive reader to make comparisons and draw con-
clusions. Other episodes are grouped in proxi-
mate clusters around common topics and need to
be seen against each other to release their secrets.
Such is the group constituted by the Physetere,
the Isle Farouche, Papefiguière and the Papi-
manes. As relationships between episode and ep-
isode are established, themes such as material-
ism, death, factionalism, and the fulfillment of all
things in time emerge, defining the structure of
the chronicles as understanding is deepened.
Studying Rabelais requires the “careful reading
and frequent meditation” which he counsels in
the prologue to Gargantua.
The principle of the Forest of Meanings is im-
portant. No single meaning is to be derived from
a biblical (and by analogy Rabelaisian) text. Ra-

belais says as much in the prologue to Gargan-
tua. Two powerful constraints on the interpretive
liberty suggested by this textual polyvalence,
however, are, first, the sensus germanus, or the
meaning that fits the context, requiring each part
to be interpreted as a function of the whole; and
second, Rabelais’s own contention that his “mys-
teries” are “living waters” to be read within the
context of his faith. Amid their baffling copia,
viewed by scholars such as Terence Cave as an
attempt to bamboozle the reader by offering false
paths that lead nowhere, and which ultimately
have no meaning, Rabelais’s chronicles hold for
other readers the allure of a coded and esoteric
text, which he intended to be deciphered by
“Gens de Bien” or right-minded initiates, while
erecting barriers against the arrogant and unwor-
thy. Indeed, for 450 years Rabelais’s allegories
have tempted people to seek la sustantificque
mouelle or marrow; and whether revealing or
concealing their meaning, they continuously ex-
emplify the dedicatory assertion (G) that “laugh-
ter is the characteristic of humanity” (“le rire est
le propre de l’homme” [G “To My Readers”]).
Readings: Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously
Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Al-
legorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); Terence
Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1979); Henri De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les
Quatre Sens de l’Ecriture, pt. 1, bk. 1, vol. 1 (Paris:
Aubier, 1959–64); John MacQueen, Allegory, Critical
Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1970); Fred W. Mar-
shall, “Les symboles des allégories de Rabelais,”
BAARD 5.2 (1993): 86–102; Fred W. Marshall, “The
Allegory of Rabelais’ Gargantua,” AJFS 24.2 (1987):
115–54; Fred W. Marshall, “The Great Allegory,”
AJFS 26.1 (1989): 12–51.
Fred W. Marshall
ALMANACS (ALMANACHS) Widely con-
sulted calendars based on astrology and folklore,
almanacs constitute a medieval text that Rabelais
disparaged and yet copied. He composed a total
of five such works—three called almanacs and
the other two, prognostications—between 1533
and 1544. The Prognostications and Almanachs
reveal the unorthodox literary style and complex
philosophical grounding found in Rabelais’s Pan-
Almanacs 5
tagruelian chronicles for which he is better
known.
Ptolemy of the second century initially distin-
guished two facets of the science of astrology:
judicial astrology—that is, the prophetic qualities
of the heavenly bodies—and natural astrology,
or the study of their physical properties. Rabelais
was well versed in the latter category, and his
astronomical knowledge is demonstrated in his
single nonsatiric almanac of 1541. This two-page
work is distinctive from the others in that it con-
tains no prose but consists instead of an iconog-
raphy of zodiac signs indicating celestial
phenomena throughout the course of the year.
According to available historical evidence, only
two astronomical errors exist in this diagram. Ra-
belais’s satirization of predictive astrology was
most likely influenced by Pico della Miran-
dola’s fifteenth-century, twelve-volume opus en-
titled Arguments against Astrology.
Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication
(1533) is a concise six-page tract narrated by his
pseudonym Master Alcofrybas Nasier. Its intro-
duction and ten chapters treat the same topics
addressed in prophetic almanacs: the predomi-
nant sicknesses of the coming year, the most
fruitful crops, the fate of various countries, and
the coming meteorological conditions. The first
chapter succinctly sums up Rabelais’s objections
to claims of the prognosticators: “Whatever you
may be told by those crazy astrologers . . . don’t
believe that this year there will be any governor
of the universe other than God the Creator, Who
by His divine Word rules and moderates all . . .
not Saturn, nor Mars, nor Jupiter nor any other
planet, certainly not the angels, or saints, or men,
or devils, will have any virtue, efficacy, or influ-
ence, unless God, in His good pleasure, gives it
to them.” Rabelais guardedly excuses believers
of the almanacs as they may be dimwitted but
not malicious. The remainder of the text consists
of broad, whimsical truisms. The accumulation
of obvious conditions, along with the occasional
insult to narrow-minded scholars, makes for a
surprisingly funny text. In contrast to prophetic
almanacs, Rabelais’s parody foretells the future
of the lower classes rather than that of the pow-
erful or noble. Rabelais’s subsequent parodies
are much shorter. His final New Prognostication
for 1544 (Pronostication nouvelle pour 1544) is
6 Alterity or Otherness
an amalgam of vague prophecy and serious
study of lunar eclipses.
Composed during his first, and some would
claim finest, creative period, Rabelais’s almanacs
and prognostications have been overshadowed by
his longer and undoubtedly superior works. Ra-
belais was attracted to the medieval tradition as
a literary source while still critical of the igno-
rance of figures of medieval authority—notably
the Sorbonne theologians who themselves would
not categorically reject the claims of prophetic
astrologers. The composition of his almanacs al-
lowed him to simultaneously challenge lax the-
ological tenets and to expand his experimentation
with French prose.
Readings: Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renais-
sance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983);
Margaret Harp, “François Rabelais’s Almanachs,”
Halcyon 16 (1994): 223–34; François Rabelais, Pan-
tagrueline prognostication (1533), Almanach de 1533,
Almanach de 1535, Almanach pour 1541, Pronosti-
cation nouvelle pour 1544.
Margaret Harp
ALTERITY OR OTHERNESS The concept
of “alterity” or “otherness” originates in psycho-
analytical literary theory. Broadly speaking, in
the context of Rabelais it is the way in which a
dominant discourse constructs another (usually
subordinate) group or idea as being different
from itself by projecting its own fears, desires,
rejections, and frustrations onto it. Sexual, geo-
graphical, and ethnic differences are therefore not
so much represented as reconstructed from the
repressed and subsequently rediscovered experi-
ence of writer and reader. Recent criticism has
enabled Rabelais to be reevaluated in the light of
theories such as alterity, signaling a shift in crit-
ical interest away from debates that privileged
the importance of the rise of Protestantism. In
Rabelais, the encounter with the “Other” has
three primary manifestations: the Turk (Panta-
gruel), the discovery of the New World (Fourth
Book), and the representation of women
throughout the work. Feminist critics have used
the concept of “otherness” extensively to de-
scribe the position of the female reader. In his
first meeting with Pantagruel (P 9) Panurge al-
ludes briefly to his imprisonment in Turkey,
where we later (16) learn he was placed on a spit,
wrapped in bacon, and almost roasted alive be-
fore escaping. For Timothy Hampton, Panurge’s
escape shows the language difficulties experi-
enced by the Christian humanist community
when faced with cultural difference. The anec-
dote is peppered with elements that highlight
Panurge’s awareness of the differences between
Christians and Turks such as the continued
references to drinking wine and eating bacon.
Furthermore, the clear evidence of the Turks’
kindness and charity is negated by their trans-
formation from figurative to literal dogs at the
end of Panurge’s account, highlighting the dan-
gers of an overly reductive reading and revealing
the need to state a moral message that privileges
Christian values.
“Otherness” is also apparent in the marvels
and monsters represented in the strange world of
voyage and adventure in the Fourth Book. For
Kristeva, although it develops the theme of
travel, the Fourth Book does not so much de-
scribe the wonders of foreign lands as give shape
to the “excess” that originates in the dreams and
political conflicts of the reader’s world. Further-
more, Rabelais succeeds in provoking a sense of
strangeness and disquiet in the reader, which pre-
figure Freud’s work on the “Unheimliche” (un-
canny). Carla Freccero has explained how the
Haughty Lady of Paris’s resistance to Panurge
constitutes an “alien voice” in the text. Similar
observations can be made about other female
characters concerning the way in which they re-
sist description or are excluded from the narra-
tive. Freccero has also used “otherness” to elu-
cidate the particular problems experienced when
reading Rabelais’s text as a woman, when one
might be unable or unwilling to acquiesce with
the dominant ideological and narrative dynamics.
Readings: Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty
Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pan-
tagruel, 14),” JMRS 15 (1985): 57–67; Timothy
Hampton, Inventing Renaissance France: Literature
and Nation in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 2001); Timothy Hampton,
“ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric
of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 58–82; Julia
Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Folio,
2001).
Pollie Bromilow

ANARCHE From the Greek a¬narxoz (“with-
out authority”). King of the Dipsodes (the
“Thirsty”), who invade the Amaurotes in the
“Dipsodic Wars” (P 23, 25–32), leading to yet
another illustration of Pantagruel’s title of
“King of the Thirsty” on the title page. It is again
Panurge, however, whose initiative seals the fate
of the defeated “antiprince.” Whereas Pantagruel
treats the defeated army in a humane fashion,
even bringing a new “Golden Age” to the lib-
erated countries, Panurge, inspired by Episté-
mon’s account of the inverted destinies in the
underworld (P 30), is bent on humiliating Anar-
che by taking away his splendid clothes, marry-
ing him to an old repulsive woman, who will end
up beating her emasculated husband, and turning
him into a hawker of “green sauce” (P 31). Most
importantly, the symbolic killing of the bad ruler,
Panurge’s final victim in Pantagruel, foreshad-
ows the trickster’s own destiny in the Third
Book, where he, too, will sing the praise of the
“green sauce” in an effort to justify his bad man-
agement of the Castellany of Salmigondin (3BK
2). This praise will ultimately lead to the pivotal
and unconvincing paradoxical Praise of Debts,
the beginning of Panurge’s decline. The behavior
of Anarche’s wife will also come back to haunt
Panurge, as his main concerns are to be assured
that he will not be beaten or cuckolded by a fu-
ture wife. The trickster’s new clothes in the
Third Book provide an additional hint: as in An-
arche’s new garb, the predominant colors blue
and green (pers et vert) seem to indicate the di-
minished status of both characters. They no
longer fit in the respective “new worlds” and rep-
resent a ridiculed, perverted example of outdated
modes of ruling, thinking, and behaving.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers
livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 13 (1976): 163–80;
Edwin Duval, “Anarche in Utopia: The Political Di-
mension,” The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, ch. 5
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
Bernd Renner
ANDOUILLES (CHITTERLINGS, SAU-
SAGES) Chapters 35–42 of the Fourth Book
are devoted to the Pantagrueline encounter with
the Andouilles. Literally tripe sausages, meta-
phorically andouille designates the phallus and/
Andouilles 7
or a fool. Probably because andouille is gram-
matically feminine, Rabelais’s warlike, phallic
creatures are all females, including Niphleseth,
their queen, whose Hebrew name means “phal-
lus.”
These creatures, hereditary enemies of Quar-
esmeprenant, attack Pantagruel’s company,
mistaking them for their foe. An earlier peace
treaty between Quaresmeprenant and the An-
douilles was frustrated when Quaresmeprenant
refused to accept the “Boudins saulvaiges” (“sel-
vaticques”) and the “Saulcissons montigenes”
(4BK 35) as allies of the Andouilles. Alban
Krailsheimer identifies the boudins or blood sau-
sages as inhabitants of the Black Forest; Bucer’s
adherents, the saulcissons or large sausages as
the Swiss, or Zwingli’s adepts; Quaresmepren-
ant, as Charles V. The Andouilles, he believes,
are Lutherans: Rabelais chose to represent them
as tripe sausages after witnessing the intrafaith
conflict at Schmalkalden. (Schmal ⫽ narrow ⫹
Kaldaunen ⫽ small intestines or tripe ⫽ an-
douilles). The carnal hordes are revealed as the
Protestants allied against the emperor.
Barbara Bowen and Walter Kaiser show that,
although the struggle resembles the traditional
battle between Lent and Carnival, neither side
represents Lent or Carnival unequivocally. The
Andouilles are compared with eels, Lenten food,
and Quaresmeprenant presents certain traits com-
mon to Carnival.
Pantagruel’s ships, after defeating the Physe-
tere, land on the Isle Farouche, where they cel-
ebrate a thanksgiving banquet. Rabelais’s ban-
quets can generally be interpreted as informal
masses. During the “second service,” Pantagruel
sees Andouilles climbing a tree near the “retraict
du guobelet,” the tabernacle where the Chalice is
kept. They are observing Pantagruel’s style of
celebrating the Eucharist, the sacrament causing
the greatest friction between Christian factions.
The Andouilles attack and are winning until
Frère Jan and the cooks appear on the battlefield
in a huge Truye (sow), a tanklike vehicle like the
Trojan horse, containing two hundred combat-
cooks (note the similarity between Troie/Troye
and Truye). The Andouilles are decimated.
Arriving in time to save them is the deity and
source of all Andouilles, “un grand, gras, gros,
8 Androgyne
gris pourceau”: a gigantic winged hog, whose
wings and eyes are red, ears green, teeth yellow,
tail black, transparent feet, and a collar bearing
the motto “HUS ATHENAN, a pig teaching Mi-
nerva” (4BK 41). This absurd figure comes from
“la Transmontane,” across the mountains. For
Rabelais in Lyon, these would be the Alps: the
flying hog could be flying from Wittenberg. If
Andouilles are Lutherans, their “deity” and
source would be Martin Luther, characterized
as a hog in the opening sentence of Pope Leo
X’s Bull of excommunication, Exsurge Domine:
“Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause. A wild boar
has invaded thy vineyard.”
The red, green, yellow, black, and transparent
colors of the pig (named Mardigras) are iden-
tified with precious stones: eyes like rubies, ears
like emeralds, teeth like topazes, tail like Lucul-
lian marble, feet like diamonds. These colors and
stones contain religious symbolism: ruby ⫽ di-
vine love, emerald ⫽ hope, diamond ⫽ faith,
black stones and the color black ⫽ penitence and
humility. Topaz (yellow) is an antivenom, per-
haps an antidote for Luther’s invective. Thus, the
hog incarnates faith, hope, charity, the cardinal
virtues, plus resistance to poison—spreading
twenty-seven barrels of mustard over the battle-
field. This mustard acts as a healing and resur-
recting balm for the Andouilles—their
“sangréal” (holy or royal blood—another Eucha-
ristic metaphor). However, mustard is a common
Rabelaisian and contemporary symbol for fecal
matter. The number 27 is a composite of 9s (the
number for theology, as seen in Dante): 27 is 9
⫻ 3; 2 ⫹ 7 ⫽ 9. Rabelais lampoons Lutheran
theology as “mustard.”
The Andouilles have Mardigras in common
with Pantagruel’s company, whose password is
also Mardigras—both parties accept and partici-
pate in bodily life and its pleasures. However,
the Andouilles represent a fleshly extreme; the
Pantagruelistes embody moderation.
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “L’Episode des An-
douilles (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapitres XXXV–
XLIIII), esquisse d’une méthode de lecture,” Cahiers
de Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–26; Barbara C. Bowen,
“Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” L’Esprit créa-
teur 21 (1981): 12–25; Edwin M. Duval, “La messe,
la cène, 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,” François Ra-
belais: Ouvrage publié pour le 4e centenaire de sa
mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Robert Mar-
ichal, “Rabelais et les censures de la Sorbonne,” Le
Quart livre de 1548, ER 9 (1971): 138–41; Florence
M. Weinberg, “Strates de prose emblématique: L’Isle
des Andouilles,” Rabelais et les leçons du rire (Or-
léans: Paradigme, 2000): 181–93.
Florence M. Weinberg
ANDROGYNE The first use in French litera-
ture and the only direct reference to the Andro-
gyne in the works of Rabelais occurs in the de-
scription of the badge on young Prince
Gargantua’s hat (G 8). Rabelais refers the
reader to the myth of the Androgyne as it is
found in Plato’s Symposium and creates his own
variant Androgyne for the prince’s device. The
ideal reader presumably recalls that Plato’s orig-
inal Androgynes are Janus-faced, gender-marked
combinations specifically precluded from carnal
union: Plato explains that after they were parted
at the belly Zeus “turned the parts of generation
round to the front for this had not always been
their position, and they sowed the seed no longer
as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but
in one another” (Symposium 191). Rabelais’s
changes are deliberate. He turns the heads 180
degrees so that they look at, not away from, each
other and turns Plato’s gendered figure into one
with “deux culz” (“two pairs of buttocks”). This
now apparently copulating Androgyne is to be
combined with the badge’s Pauline motto, “car-
itas non quaerit quia sua sunt” (“charity seeketh
not her own” [1 Corinthians 13.5]), given only
in Greek.
Some critics consider Rabelais’s Androgyne to
be just another comic obscenity. But Gargantua’s
device, a defining hieroglyphic self-representa-
tion, the other half of which is Pauline, invites
interpretation. A device was personal, its visual
element hieroglyphic, so that only properly tuned
minds would understand. The difficulties critics
have had with Gargantua’s Androgyne speak to
its hieroglyphic nature as does Rabelais’s choice
to present the motto only in Greek, which in

1535 was a way of severely limiting those who
could interpret the badge. The altered head po-
sition has been seen as a reference to Marsilio
Ficino’s treatment of love as a first step toward
the contemplation of the Divine; the heads gaze
at one another in order to rise to the Idea of
Beauty and beyond, toward God, toward the time
when we will be able to contemplate the Divine
face to face (1 Corinthians 13.12), although Fi-
cino’s commentary (4.3) dismisses the physical,
and nothing suggests that Rabelais was influ-
enced by Ficino.
A solution that follows from Schwartz,
Screech, Masters, and others is that Gargantua’s
Androgyne is intended to evoke marriage, to
join Plato and Moses (Genesis 2.24: “erunt duo
in carne una”) to show “human nature at its mys-
tic beginning” (G 8). On Gargantua’s hat, along-
side the badge, there is a “grande plume bleue,
prinse d’un Onocrotal” (“a big blue feather taken
from an onocrotal”), the strange name veiling the
nature of the bird, a kind of pelican, just as the
Greek letters do the message of charity on the
badge. The pelican, thought to feed its young
from its breast, was a symbol of charity. As a
marriage impresa, a statement of what one in-
tended to do, the badge is not controversial. The
young prince will one day marry—Pantagruel,
published two years earlier, put this beyond
doubt, and the place given to marriage in the
Third Book is worth recalling here. Marriage
may also be understood in a figurative sense: the
young prince will embrace, cleave to, his evan-
gelical Christian faith, based on the principle of
charity; as a ruler, he will be married to his peo-
ple, as Christ did the Church, and as the Christian
faithful espouse Christ. Taken in the broadest
sense, image and motto together, the badge lays
forth a program appropriate for the young prince.
Readings: Guy Demerson, François 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 Thélème,” FF 26.1 (2001): 1–19; Mar-
ian Rothstein, “The Mutations of the Androgyne: Its
Functions in Early Modern France,” SCJ 34.2 (2003):
407–34; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:
Duckworth, 1979); Jerome Schwartz, “Scatology and
Eschatology in Gargantua’s Androgyne Device,” ER
Animals 9
14 (1977): 265–75; Jerome Schwartz, “Gargantua’s
Device and the Abbey of Thélème: A Study in Ra-
belais’ Iconography,” YFS 47 (1972): 232–42.
Marian Rothstein
ANIMALS The standard definition of “ani-
mal” for Rabelais is based on Aristotle’s “that
which moves by itself” (GP 5B 26; OC 5BK 25),
or that which is inhabited by an “animus,” soul.
The boundary between human and nonhuman an-
imals is thus fluid, as many of Rabelais’s tales
witness. The “Turkish dogs” in Pantagruel 14
who are both insulted Turks and actual dogs, the
liveryman called Malicorne in the Fourth Book
(3) who returns to Gargantua with three licornes
or unicorns, and the fables of metamorphosis in
the Third Book (3) all evoke a metamorphic
world of transformation—linguistic or literary—
between human and animal. The moving roads
(GP 5B 26; OC 5BK 25) are also declared to be
animals, as are the trees of the Isle des Ferre-
ments (Toolmaking Island [5BK 9]). Ongoing
teratological debates also influence many of Ra-
belais’s animal scenes—Gargantua’s mare is
certainly a monster both in its size and appear-
ance. For our purposes, we will limit ourselves
here to the common modern understanding of
“animal.”
Animals are both a theme and an important
narrative tool in the Rabelaisian corpus. Their
representations and functions are as multifaceted
as the texts themselves. Rabelaisian animals can
be quotidian, exotic, monstrous, fantastic, bibli-
cal, fabled, literary, or scientific, vacillating be-
tween realism, improbability, and pure fantasy.
This constant variety and permeability is not only
at the heart of Rabelais’s conception of nature,
but is also a reflection of the diversity and con-
tradictions of the discourses on animals in the
sixteenth century. Rabelais seems to delight in
the narrative possibilities offered by the conflu-
ence of different systems of zoological knowl-
edge, and tales of animals, that characterize his
period. For in the sixteenth century, animal lore
(pagan and Christian) and authoritative classical
texts coexist with humanistic textual criticism
and a spirit of experiential enquiry. It would be
simplistic to present sixteenth-century zoology as
an abandonment of medieval “fables” in favor of
10 Animals
a new rationalism, or as a clean transition from
textual authority to direct observation. Rather,
the animal world was for a long time understood
and interpreted with varying ideological struc-
tures: rational-observational, theological, classi-
cal, teratological, occult. Rabelais’s animal world
is refracted through all of these lenses.
Classical zoological works were widely avail-
able in sixteenth-century France, including Ar-
istotle’s treatises on animals and Pliny’s Natural
History, although sometimes subject to chal-
lenges based on direct observation. Also widely
read were Christian moralizing treatises on the
animal world, such as the Natural Mirror of Vin-
cent de Beauvais or the many bestiaries. Tera-
tological texts from antiquity to Ambroise Paré
were frequently reprinted. In the second quarter
of the sixteenth century, there was an increased
philological interest in animals, and attempts
were made to bridge the cognitive gap between
Latin zoological vocabulary and observed reality
by providing glossaries or dictionaries: for ex-
ample, Charles Estienne’s On Greek and Latin
Names of Trees, Fish . . . (1536). This etymolog-
ical quest is an important component of Rabe-
lais’s animal world: the physetere (4BK 33–34)
is, among many other things, an exploration of a
neologism from Pliny.
The 1550s—the decade of Rabelais’s Fourth
and Fifth Books—was a landmark decade for the
publication of vernacular natural history works,
many in French: Conrad Gesner’s encyclopedic
Histories of Animals (first volume 1551); Pierre
Belon’s History of Strange Seafish (1551) and
History of the Nature of Birds (1554); and Guil-
laume Rondelet’s On Marine Fish (1554). A
voyage to the Near East prompted Pierre Gilles
to write a New Description of the Elephant
(1562), which the compiler of the Fifth Book al-
most certainly read. Another important develop-
ment was the influence of accounts of New
World voyages, in which creatures were de-
scribed whose very existence was nowhere pos-
ited in classical texts: André Thevet, The Sin-
gularities of Antarctic France (1558). All of
these works often relied heavily on classical
sources, while also challenging or adding to them
to some degree (see Travel Literature).
Rabelais’s animals are often dialogic sites for
these varying systems of knowledge. A letter
from Pantagruel to his father accompanying the
gift of the Tarande and three unicorns chal-
lenges Pliny’s assertion that no man has ever
seen a live unicorn (4BK 4). (It is typical of Ra-
belais that the “new” information is by no means
less dubious than the old!) At the climax of the
Dindenault episode, the narrator assures us that
Aristotle (4BK 8) affirms the stupidity of sheep
(4BK 8). The fauna of the Pays de Satin (5BK
29) forms a veritable compendium of contem-
porary zoological knowledge, opinions, and leg-
ends. A description of elephants that borrows
from Pliny is also used to refute Pliny and Ar-
istotle on the question of elephants’ joints; a con-
temporary debate on whether tusks were horns or
teeth is also evoked. Yet the discourse of direct
observation is only one of many discourses that
compete cacophonously for space. The animals
of this country are, for example, all made of tap-
estry but are nevertheless invoked as evidence
against the opinions of those who have only seen
such creatures “in the land of tapestry.” De-
scribed as being “just like” familiar animals “ex-
cept for” some more or less incredible difference,
these creatures—like the Tarande (4BK 2), a sort
of reindeer-moose with chameleonlike proper-
ties—are suspended indefinitely in the Rabelai-
sian imaginary between worlds, discourses, and
knowledges.
Animals provide comic effect, often obscene—
the goslet “torchecul” or arse-wipe (G 13), the
fable of the fox and the lion (P 15)—or used as
a measure of gigantism, for example, Pantagruel
eating cows and a bear (P 4), or Gargantua’s
mare drowning Picrochole’s men in her urine (G
36). Fantastic or monstrous animals also provide
some of Rabelais’s most biting satire: the An-
douilles (4BK 35–42) or the Siticine birds (5BK
2).
Contemporary accounts of travel to the New
World influence the descriptions of animals in
the Fourth and Fifth Books. The sightings of fly-
ing fish (4BK 3), almost a cliché of New World
travel writing, are mentioned by many explorers,
from Jacques Cartier to Jean de Léry. Panta-
gruel’s gift to his father of the Tarande and three
unicorns (4BK 4) reflects the common practice
of European explorers sending exotic beasts back
to their kings with instructions on how to tend to
their needs. Like many animals in reality, the An-

douilles that were sent to the king of France via
Gargantua (4BK 42) die owing to a change of
climate and diet.
A certain pragmatism is involved in the use
made of some animals in the Fourth Book. The
Gozal or homing pigeon (4BK 3) allows political
news to fly across the world faster than is pos-
sible with a boat. Even the physetere (4BK 33–
35), which partakes not so much of contempo-
rary travel accounts as of long-standing literary
and biblical traditions, is gutted and dissected, its
kidneys harvested and declared “most useful” for
profit. Consideration of ways in which animals
could be profitable was rather novel in zoological
works. Rabelais is up to date with contemporary
debates and even anticipates them: in Rome,
three years after the publication of Rabelais’s
fourth book, Olaus Magnus will insist in his His-
tory on the utility of certain animals to human-
kind, including whales, considered both highly
dangerous and useful.
Rabelais’s baffling animal world may be read
as a metaphor for Rabelais’s own conception of
his “monstrous” and hybrid text, a reading en-
couraged by Rabelais himself: the prologue to
Gargantua describes the exterior of the Sileni as
painted with fantasy animals such as harpies and
flying goats. And in the prologue to the Third
Book, the narrator frets about scaring his read-
ers in the same way that Ptolemy of Egypt
shocked his subjects by presenting them with a
Bactrian camel. As well as serving as sources of
comedy and satire and as vehicles for the pres-
entation of multiple discourses, animals, then, are
also coterminous with the “ugly surface” of Ra-
belais’s text, whose amusing aspect hides the se-
rious hidden content.
Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une Narra-
tion biscornue: Le Tarande du Quart Livre,” Poétique
et narration: Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, ed.
François Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand
(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 Sainéan, L’histoire naturelle et les
branches connexes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris:
Champion, 1921); Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais
dans son enquête. Etude sur le “Quart” et le “Cin-
quième” livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith,
Aristotle 11
“Aspects du discours zoologique dans le Cinquiesme
Livre,” ER 40 (2001): 103–14; Marcel Tetel, “Le phy-
setère bicéphale,” Writing the Renaissance (Lexington,
KY: French Forum, 1992); Florence Weinberg, “Lay-
ers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” The
Sixteenth Century Journal; Journal of Early Modern
Studies 26.2 (1995): 367–77.
Louisa Mackenzie
ANTIPHYSIE See Physis and Antiphysie
ARIOSTO See Orlando Furioso
ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.) Although Plato
is more in evidence in Rabelais’s works, the
French author shares the traditional view that Ar-
istotle was the “paragon of all philosophy, and
first among men” (GP 563; 5BK 19), and Aris-
totelian thought patterns inevitably suffused his
writing. Aristotle’s emphasis on man’s natural
desire for knowledge which opens the Meta-
physics seems to have appealed to him (Alman-
ach pour l’an 35), and he gives prominent place
to “Rire est le propre de l’homme” (G ded.), or
“laughter is the characteristic of humanity.” Ar-
istotle is depicted sympathetically, carrying a
lantern and “watching, examining, and writing
everything down” (GP 5BK 31; OC 5BK 30).
Rabelais often refers to him directly (everywhere
except in Pantagruel) and indirectly, ranging
over most of the corpus, especially the Organon,
the Problems, the scientific works, the Politics
and the Ethics, appealing to him as an authority,
for example, on natural history (GP 5BK 30; OC
5BK 29), meteorology (4BK 17), physiology
(eleven-month pregnancies [G 3], the insatiabil-
ity of women [3BK 27], the origin of sperm
[3BK 31]), optical questions (G 10), and meta-
physics (Entelechy, GP 5BK 19; OC 5BK 18).
The references are at times purely facetious, such
as a nonexistent text on the art of invisible writ-
ing (G 1) or Gargantua’s assertion that the prob-
lem of the freshness of a young girl’s thighs is
not to be found in his works (G 39); and even
when they are real and pertinent, the learning is
rarely to be taken seriously. In spite of Rabelais’s
knowledge of Greek, he was working from Le-
fèvre d’Etaples’s translation, compendia such as
Erasmus’s Adages, or secondary authors such as
André Tiraqueau. Moreover, his knowledge of
12 Art and Architecture
Aristotle often comes from the scholastics whom
he has studied deeply and whom he despises, and
he does not seem particularly affected by the
neo-Aristotelianism of his day.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du
rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua,
Le Quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alban J. Krailsh-
eimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1963); Jean Plattard, L’oeuvre de Ra-
belais (Paris: Champion, 1967).
Peter Sharratt
ART AND ARCHITECTURE Rabelais wrote
at a moment of artistic transformation in France
that saw the building, decoration, and furnishing
of royal and princely chateaux in a classical man-
ner derived from Italy, and, in painting, the es-
tablishing of the School of Fontainebleau, with
the arrival of Rosso (1530) and Primaticcio
(1532). Rabelais’s friendship with Philibert de
l’Orme, “grand architecte du roy Megiste” (4BK
61), responsible for Chambord and Anet, and
with Guillaume Philandrier, pupil and friend of
Serlio and editor of Vitruvius, gave him direct
access to the latest architectural thinking. He also
became increasingly interested in the ancient art
and antiquities of Egypt and of Rome. The list
of the ruined temples, obelisks, pyramids, mon-
uments, and tombs on the Isle des Macreons
(4BK 25) reflects exactly the contemporary artis-
tic ethos. Rabelais includes painting and sculp-
ture in the school curriculum (at a time when
they were still considered to be sordid and me-
chanical arts) and advocates that pupils should
visit craftsmen’s workshops (G 24). He was also
interested in the applied arts, writing knowled-
geably and copiously about furniture (G 55), cos-
tume (G 8 and 56), jewelry and precious stones
(G 8, 56; 5BK 38, 42), silverware (4BK 13), mo-
saics (GP 5BK 38–40; OC 5BK 37–39) and tap-
estry (4BK 2, 4; GP 5BK 24, 30, 31; OC 5BK
23, 29, 30).
In his architectural descriptions Rabelais is
resolutely modern. He first links Thélème with
Bonnivet, now destroyed, and in 1542 adds the
names of Chambord and Chantilly, all still in the
process of building, with traditional elements and
much fantasy. The Temple of the Divine Bottle
with its marble staircase, automatic doors, its tes-
sellated pavement of precious stones, with cor-
responding mosaics in the emblémature over the
door, and in the vaulted ceiling, and the fantastic
fountain, is derived in part from Francesco Co-
lonna’s Dream of Polyphilus (Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili [Venice: Aldus, 1499; Paris: Kerver,
1546]). The ceiling mosaic of Bacchus’s battle
with the Indians shows Rabelais’s use of ec-
phrasis coupled with the enargeia or vivid rep-
resentation characteristic of such a visual writer,
as does his account of the Pays de Satin in
which the reader enters the marvelous world de-
picted in tapestries (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 5BK
29–30). He was concerned, too, with optical the-
ories of the effects of light and color (“Une
Lampe admirable,” GP 5BK 41; OC 5BK 40).
Rabelais often refers to commonplaces about
classical art: Polycletus’s perfect statue (GP 5BK
42; OC 5BK 41), Zeuxis’s painting of grapes
pecked at by birds (GP 5BK 38; OC 5BK 37),
Daedalus capturing movement in sculpture (4BK
50), Heliogabalus’s feast of painted and sculpted
food (GP 5BK 31; OC 5BK 30), and Apelles’s
and Aristides’s choice of impossible subjects
(“tonnerres, esclaires, fouldres, ventz, Écho, les
meurs et les espritz” [GP 5BK 40; OC 5BK 39]).
Elsewhere, in describing what Panurge and his
companions bought on Medamothi, Rabelais
refers to imaginary and impossible paintings
(4BK 2), among which were canvases of Charles
Charmois who worked at Fontainebleau, Saint-
Maur-les Fossés, 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 Thé-
lèmites’: Rêve et Réalités,” Rabelais pour le XXIe siè-
cle, ed. Michel Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Mir-
eille Huchon, “Thélème et l’Art Sténographique,”
Rabelais pour le XXIe siècle, ed. Michel Simonin (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1998); Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie et
l’Alexandrisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale à Me-
damothi,” ER 1 (1956): 98–111; Paul J. Smith, Voyage
et écriture. Étude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1987) (originally in Neophilologus, 70
[1986]: 1–12).
Peter Sharratt
ASCLEPIADES Ancient doctor who, in ad-
dition to extolling the therapeutic benefits of
wine and passive exercise, reformed traditional

Hippocratic theoretical practice and devised a
physical theory used to explain all biological
phenomena in uniformly simple terms. Although
none of his texts survive, Rabelais gained knowl-
edge of Asclepiades by way of other Greek au-
thors including Galen and Pliny the Elder, who
give testimony to the value of his theories. Ech-
oing Galen’s belief in the need for doctors to be
in good health themselves in order to heal others,
Rabelais uses Asclepiades as a model in the pro-
logue to the Fourth Book. The passage relates
Asclepiades’s pact with Good Fortune that, as a
doctor, his reputation should stand on the ex-
ample of his own health—required to be excel-
lent from the time any physician begins practic-
ing medicine until he breathes his last breath.
This was the case for Asclepiades, who died
without ever being ill, at a ripe old age following
an unfortunate fall from a tower. Aside from this
biographical anecdote, the true value of Ascle-
piades’s theory for Rabelais lies in the manner in
which he promotes the positive virtues of wine.
Knowing this theory as he did, our Renaissance
doctor could in good conscience promote the cy-
cle of thirst, drink, and satiation—all in good
moderation—as natural, normal, and necessary
to the maintenance of human health.
Reading: J. T. Vallance, The Lost Theory of Ascle-
piades of Bithnya (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).
Lesa Randall
ASTROLOGY A distinction between “astron-
omy” and “astrology” did exist during Rabelais’s
time, and a vigorous debate arose about the va-
lidity of “astrology.” Nonetheless, until the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century, most astronomers
accepted the validity of at least some astrological
prediction, the words “astronomy” and “astrol-
ogy” were often used interchangeably, and the
more important distinction was between “natural
astrology” and “judicial astrology.” Natural as-
trology dealt with the weather and medicine. It
was the most successful means of predicting the
weather in the sixteenth century. Rabelais was
trained as a physician and would have studied
astrology as part of his medical training because
most physicians believed that the heavenly bod-
ies influenced both individual and public health.
They believed that the birth chart, or horoscope,
Astrology 13
gave crucial information about the physical and
emotional constitution of the patient; they studied
the heavenly bodies to know when to administer
certain treatments, to predict the course of a dis-
ease, and to predict and explain the occurrence
of epidemics. Judicial astrology involved trying
to describe specific personal characteristics and
to predict specific human events from the heav-
enly bodies. Most opponents of astrology were
motivated primarily by religious reasons: astrol-
ogy interfered with divine providence and human
free will, and it provided a secular explanation
for phenomena that some would have preferred
to attribute to divine retribution for human sin-
fulness. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Dis-
putations against Judicial Astrology (1494), the
most widely discussed work against astrology,
was motivated by the religious belief in an ab-
solute contradiction between human free will and
astrological prediction.
In Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, Rabelais
suggested that the humanist education should in-
clude astronomy but should leave off judicial as-
trology (P 8). Rabelais’s disapproval of divina-
tion is shown when Thaumaste, an expert in
reading signs including those of astrology, is
bested by the obscene gestures of Panurge (P
19). It is further underscored through much of
the Third Book as Panurge consults various peo-
ple about the possibility of his being cuckolded
in marriage. Her Trippa consults Panurge’s
horoscope among other forms of divination, both
real and fabricated by Rabelais; he concludes
from the horoscope that Panurge will not only be
cuckolded but also robbed and beaten by his wife
and get the pox to boot, but Her Trippa does not
know that he himself is a cuckold (3BK 25). Ra-
belais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication (1533) is
an extended satire of astrological divination in
almanacs. But in his satires Rabelais showed fa-
miliarity with the specifics of astrological predic-
tion even as he mocked it. He also published al-
manacs, possibly every year, though only four
survive, and the almanac for 1541 gives serious
advice to physicians about the best times to per-
form various medical procedures during the year.
Furthermore, his Pantagrueline Prognostication
suggests that the problem with astrological prog-
nostication is that people trust in it rather than
trusting in God. Thus, Rabelais rejected judicial
14 Astrology
astrology, at least partly for religious reasons, but
accepted natural astrology.
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-
tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1969); Dené Scoggins,
“Wine and Obscenities: Astrology’s Degradation in
the Five Books of Rabelais,” Paracelsian Moments:
Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Eu-
rope, ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D.
Gunnoe, Jr. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University
Press, 2002): 163–86.
Sheila J. Rabin
 B
BACBUC The last fifteen chapters of the Fifth
Book depict Rabelais’s heroes, who in the Third
Book decided to visit the Oracle of the Divine
Bottle to receive the “mot” or “word” within the
temple itself, which is described at length and
from a Bacchic perspective. Their initiatress is
“the princess Bacbuc, lady in waiting of the Bot-
tle, and pontiff of all mysteries.” She has them
drink from the fantastic fountain, which trans-
forms the taste of wine according to the drinker’s
imagination. After dressing Panurge in sacra-
mental habits, making him execute a series of
ritual gestures and sing a Bacchic ode (repre-
sented in the text as verses in the form of a bot-
tle), and pronouncing conjurations in Etruscan,
she invites him to receive the “word” of the sa-
cred bottle (“garbed in pure crystal, half im-
mersed in the water of a fine alabaster fountain”)
and casts a spell that causes the water to boil.
Bacbuc then interprets the word of the bottle,
“trinch,” as an “oracular word, celebrated and
understood by all nations, which to us means
“drink” (GP 5BK 46; OC 5BK 45): for drink
rather than laughter is the “propre de l’homme”
(G ded.)—or “the characteristic of humanity”—
in this work.
The character Bacbuc, whose name is taken
from the Hebrew word for “bottle,” only appears
in Rabelais’s work in the second part of the Fifth
Book, which corresponds to the second series of
sketches for that volume, and in the Fourth Book
of 1552, where she is identified with the Bottle
itself. In the title of chapter 1 in the 1552 version
of the Fourth Book (“How Pantagruel Set Sail to
Visit the Oracle of the Divine Bacbuc”), in con-
trast to the 1548 edition, Rabelais substituted the
term “Bacbuc” for “Bottle” and added a refer-
ence to “the oracle of the Divine Bottle Bacbuc.”
The term “Bacbuc” is glossed in this way by
Rabelais in the Brief Declaration of Some of the
Most Obscure Terms Contained in the Fourth
Book, added to the 1552 edition of the Fourth
Book: “Bacbouc. Bottle. In Hebrew also used for
the sound it makes when emptied.” This defini-
tion, which assimilates Bacbuc with the Bottle,
may be compared to the Thesaurus by Sante Pag-
nino published by R. Estienne in 1548 and to the
definition given in the French-Latin Dictionary
of R. Estienne in 1539: “The Hebrews call a bot-
tle “Bacbuc,” and it seems that Bacbuc and bou-
teille (“bottle”) are nomina ficta a sono quem edit
lagena quando depletur inversa” (“the names
created from the sound a flask produces when
being emptied out when upside down”).
The Bottle and Bacbuc designate the same per-
son; however, in the Fifth Book the Bottle and
the priestess Bacbuc are very distinct. Since the
second part of the Fifth Book was drafted con-
temporaneously with the Third Book, we can sur-
mise that Rabelais was not familiar with glosses
of this word in 1548.
In fact in the Fifth Book, it would appear that
Rabelais introduces additional glosses of Bacbuc.
The idea of the bottle’s immersion in water was
probably borrowed from Reuchlin, who in his De
rudimentis hebraicis (1506) supplies the follow-
ing definition: “A hard or brick-colored (testa-
ceum) vessel that is almost throat-shaped, taking
its name from the sound heard when it is im-
mersed in water.” Further, the textual reference
to boiling water may derive from the explanation
of R. Estienne in his Dictionnaire françoislatin
(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 Provençal parody of the four-
teenth century, attributed to the philosopher Levi
ben Geron. This book, intended to be read during
16 Badebec
the period of Jewish carnival, plays upon the
words Habakuk (a book of the Bible) and ha-
baqbuc (“bottle”), and “is founded upon a
mystico-carnivalesque conception of wine.”
Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’hébreu chez Ra-
belais,” Revue belge de Philologie et d’histoire, 46
(1968): 725–48; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Le nom de
Bacbuc,” RHR 34 (1992): 41–46.
Mireille Huchon
BADEBEC Wife of Gargantua, mother of
Pantagruel. Her name, derived from the Gascon,
means “wide-open mouth,” reflecting her role in
the text as a receptacle to carry Gargantua’s
child. Badebec appears in the work briefly in
Pantagruel in the two chapters (2–3) that de-
scribe her pregnancy, Pantagruel’s birth, and her
resulting death. These events seem inextricably
linked in the narrator’s mind. Badebec’s impact
on the narrative is minimized by the fact that her
death is announced in the same sentence in which
she is first mentioned. Throughout the episode,
her presence in the text is eclipsed because her
experience is exploited as a way to affirm the
importance of the male protagonists. The narrator
presents her death as an inevitable consequence
and confirmation of Pantagruel’s prodigious size.
Badebec is seen as devoid of specific character-
istics: she herself does not speak, and the details
of her death are not recorded, whereas the text
retains the words spoken by the midwives in re-
sponse to Pantagruel’s birth. Similarly, Gargan-
tua’s grief at his wife’s death is quickly replaced
by joy at his newborn son.
Readings: Françoise Charpentier, “Un Royaume qui
perdure sans femmes,” Rabelais’s Incomparable
Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond La Charité
(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Jefferson
Humphries, “The Rabelaisian Matrice,” RR 76.3
(1985): 251–70.
Pollie Bromilow
BAISECUL AND HUMEVESNE This epi-
sode forms one of Pantagruel’s exploits in Paris
where he completes his education and achieves
fame for a variety of reasons, in this instance by
solving a lawsuit whose complexities have de-
feated the most exalted French legal brains. Ra-
belais exploits the theme in various ways. First,
it links with his satire of scholasticism, whose
outdated methods and authorities fail to equip the
Parlement for its task. Second, it facilitates a
positive statement for humanist jurisprudence via
Pantagruel who, arraigning the conseilliers et
docteurs for their wrong approach, insists spe-
cifically that the litigants address the court in per-
son rather than have their case assessed through
documents, and generally that good legal exper-
tise is based on classical philology and philoso-
phy, not medieval ignorance. The points are sup-
ported by Du Douhet, a member of the panel of
experts, but one clearly identifiable as a human-
ist, whereupon four donkey-loads of paperwork
are burned and the parties invited to speak for
themselves. Here the textual modality changes,
since the two speeches that follow (by Baisecul
as plaintiff and Humevesne as defendant), al-
though mostly composed of comprehensible
words, are deliberately made incoherent in the
way the words are put together. As a result, the
lawyers’ perplexity becomes, at a literal level,
entirely justified. Must the reader not agree that
“We have heard indeed, but—in the name of the
devil!—we certainly haven’t understood” (P 13;
GP 174)? Pantagruel’s reaction, however, is not
to prosecute the satire, but rather to enter into
the same linguistic game as the two parties in-
asmuch as Rabelais has exploited the theme to
his satisfaction in previous chapters. Pantagruel
declares the issue to be less complex than the
assembled authorities have declared. Then he
takes a couple of turns around the room, appar-
ently deep in thought, before delivering a judg-
ment no clearer than the two previous speeches
and using a broadly similar register. The ruling
satisfies both lords, not inconceivably because it
exempts them legal costs. Meanwhile, the assem-
bled experts all swoon in ecstasy at Pantagruel’s
apparent brilliance, before being revived with
vinegar and rose water.
Rabelais’s readers have a strategic choice in
this episode. They may understand it as an alle-
gory of his theories on law, which supported
Guillaume Budé’s historical approach and at-
tacked the traditional mos italicus. In that case
the speeches become irrelevant nonsense into
which Rabelais has inserted various encoded ref-
erences (for example, to the Gallican policies of
various French kings). They may alternatively
see the satiric material as merely preluding a

piece of theatrical farce consonant with the
traditions of the basoche, whereby court proce-
dures become distorted parodies of themselves,
as here a judge crowns gibberish with gobble-
dygook and is lionized for his triumph. Further
options reside in the way one assesses the main
figures. Are Baisecul and Humevesne to be con-
demned for perverting language when they
speak (and perhaps for wasting the court’s time
in mounting a preposterous case), or are they to
be celebrated as clowns proficient in the coq-à-
l’âne? Pantagruel is, to be sure, the fulcrum of
the episode, but is he playing a game with his
audience, is he mocking the two participants, is
he adversely infected by their logorrhoea, or does
he really understand the case on their level and
in their terms? After all, he does fully satisfy
them, though one does not know precisely why.
Such intentional gaps as that effacing Panta-
gruel’s thoughts (before delivering sentence, is
he actually reflecting “deeply” [“bien profunde-
ment, comme l’on povoit estimer”]?) are crucial
to Rabelais’s technique. One reads as one
chooses, provided other readings are granted ap-
propriate respect.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1997); Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault
sens, vol. 1 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986);
John Parkin, “Comic Modality in Rabelais: Baisecul,
Humevesne, Thaumaste,” ER 18 (1985): 57–82; Fran-
çois Rigolot, “The Highs and Lows of Structuralist
Reading: Rabelais’s Pantagruel, cc. 10–13,” Distant
Voices Still Heard, ed. John O’Brien and Malcolm
Quainton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duck-
worth, 1979).
John Parkin
BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL (1895–1975) Mikhail
Bakhtin’s monograph on Rabelais, translated into
English as Rabelais and His World, was first
published in the West in 1968, a mere seven
years prior to its author’s death. Yet it comprises
a reworking of a thesis presented over twenty
years previously to the Moscow Gorky Institute
and on which he had been working as far back
as the late 1930s. Bakhtin aimed to revolutionize
Rabelais studies by laying bare the popular roots
of his humor, which, though ill understood in all
periods since his own, stemmed from a centuries-
Bakhtin, Mikhail 17
old spirit of opposition to the fixed social and
ideological hierarchies of the Middle Ages, and
which reached its apex in the communal festivi-
ties of Carnival and the literature of the Ren-
aissance, where it penetrated high culture for the
last time. As revealed in his comic verbal crea-
tions, his adaptation of popular pageants, and his
vulgarity, especially the comic exploitation of the
body’s lower organs (stomach, buttocks, and
genitals) rather than the higher (heart and brain),
Rabelais’s sense of humor was significant for
combining negative derision with positive cele-
bration in an ambivalent matrix of creativity and
destruction equally apparent in the comic coun-
terculture of the people, but lost to a modernity
whose humor was predominantly satiric. Previ-
ous analyses of Rabelais’s work had either con-
centrated on his ideas rather than his humor, or
else had reduced that humor to a mere facetious-
ness devoid of philosophical meaning. Though
never denying it, Bakhtin diminished the signif-
icance of Rabelais’s humanist awareness, seeing
the key to his work as the “culture of the market
place and of folk laughter.” His contribution to
Rabelais studies (which in fact extends beyond
Rabelais and His World) was thus deliberately
controversial and has even been interpreted as an
allegorical attack on the Stalinist repressions to
which he himself fell victim.
Admirers have praised its originality, its im-
mense range and imaginative power, together
with an infectious force of argument that suc-
ceeds even in translation: the Rabelais has been
seen as Bakhtin’s finest book. Opponents have
criticized the paucity of his detailed apparatus,
his question-begging assumptions about the pop-
ular spirit, his relegation of Rabelais’s human-
ism, including his erudite wit, to secondary im-
portance, and a bland disregard of historical
theories countering his own. In fact, these theo-
ries have disproved much of Bakhtin’s sociology.
For instance, the carnival was for him the ex-
pression of the people’s indomitable and rebel-
lious free spirit as reflected in numberless pas-
sages where Rabelais presents violent and
taboo-breaking comic scenes and converts norms
into a grotesque travesty of those norms. It tends
now to be considered not as an implicit rebellion,
but as a subtle means whereby the authorities
contained rebellion. In addition and to an extent
18 Bakhtin, Mikhail
accordingly, carnival events and performances
were created less by a general populace acting
spontaneously in riotous disorder than by specific
groups drawn particularly from the aspiring mid-
dle classes who perpetuated set traditions of an
essentially conservative nature.
The debate has deep philosophical implica-
tions concerning humor’s very nature, but, that
controversy notwithstanding, Bakhtin studies,
both within and without the Rabelaisian context,
continue to expand in range and quality. His key
errors are perhaps two. First in identifying Ra-
belais’s humor as an epitome of that of the peo-
ple at large, he insists that it is a virtually unique
blending of two comic modes: satiric attack and
comic celebration. In fact, these modes, though
different in kind, combine with varying degrees
of stability in writers of almost any period (Ra-
belais’s included)—hence, Bakhtin’s own ex-
amples which, despite his argument, spread back
from the Renaissance to ancient Greek drama
and forward into twentieth-century fiction. Sec-
ond, he appears to confuse a state of mind (the
carnival spirit, which does imply complete lib-
eration, “contrary to all existing forms of . . . or-
ganization” [Rabelais and His World 255]), with
a social reality, namely, the actual events of car-
nival, which fit far more ambiguously into the
political life of Rabelais’s times than Bakhtin can
bring himself to admit. Parodic humor such as
that invested in Panurge may thus defy respon-
sibility toward God and his church, king and
country, womanhood and the family, friendship
and the very duties of self-respect, but the actual
behavior of real clowns, jesters, and actors was
far more restrained and ritualized than his. Were
it not so, then the pre-Lenten and other holidays
enjoyed in traditional society would have in-
volved not merely a relaxation of various restric-
tions and sanctions, but the entire collapse of or-
der. License is not anarchy.
Consequently, Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais has
been judged utopian and idealistic, even atypical
of the main trend of his thinking which is ques-
tioning and dialogic rather than assertive and pre-
determined: the associated debate remains lively
among his students and followers. At the same
time, his detailed readings of various comic ep-
isodes (two examples among many are the Pi-
crocholine War in Gargantua and the Basché
sequence of the Fourth Book) achieve a richness
and complexity seldom matched elsewhere. He
identifies the positive implications of Rabelaisian
scatology (as in, say, the walls of Paris episode
in Pantagruel, or Gargantua’s invention of the
arse-wipe). He reexamines to great effect the role
and adaptation of folk rituals in Rabelaisian fic-
tion (the arrivals of the giants in Paris are but
one case in point), and the mocking of his own
status as author, which has misled so many in
their tedious reexaminations of the “sustantif-
icque mouelle” or marrow symbol and is easily
explained via Bakhtin’s notion of comic ambiv-
alence and desacralizing humor. Rabelais, here
in dialogue with himself, considered nothing too
exalted to be spared comic transformation—not
the sacred texts of the Bible, not the highest civil
or religious authorities, not his personal friends
or objects of serious study, and not the very work
he was himself producing.
Given Bakhtin’s insistence that all fruitful dis-
course be to some degree dialogic, and the fact
that he was constantly revising his own conclu-
sions and perspectives, it is more than appropri-
ate that his approach and conclusions be ques-
tioned, even radically. Although detractors still
abound, the reinsertion of dialogism and pluri-
vocity into Rabelais studies has led to interesting
advances. Among many instances, one may cite
the importance of discussion in the humanist ed-
ucation of Gargantua, the dialogic cast of mind
apparent in Rabelais’s mentor Erasmus, carni-
valesque interpretations of Thélème (which
Bakhtin actually excludes from study), Michel
Jeanneret’s notion of the noninterpretability of
scenes like the Gaster episode where the au-
thor’s imagery defies the narrator’s allegory, and
finally the importance of good company, in some
ways Rabelais’s entire message, and clearly the
means by which Panurge, that amiable devil and
rambling idiot, may be wholeheartedly re-
deemed.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Michaël Baraz, Rabelais et la joie de la
liberté (Paris: Corti, 1983); Richard M. Berrong, Ra-
belais and Bakhtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1986); Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist,

Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984); Michel Jeanneret, Le Défi des signes (Or-
léans: Paradigme, 1994); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s
Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); John Parkin, Interpretations of Rabelais (Lew-
iston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
John Parkin
BASCHÉ (4BK 12–15) Panurge recounts the
story of Lord Basché in the Fourth Book, chap-
ters 12–15. In this episode, the fat prior of Saint-
Louant sends the Chicanous (or Chiquanous) to
harass the nobleman. Basché subverts the system
by creating a ruse—when the Chicanous arrive,
Basché’s household is pretending to hold a wed-
ding celebration. As part of the festivities, guests
playfully hit each other. The Chicanous partici-
pate and end up being severely beaten, and each
time a new one returns, he receives an even
greater drubbing. It has been hypothesized that
the real-life Lord Basché was René 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
Epistémon express reservations about Basché’s
methods (see 4BK 16). The description of Bas-
ché’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
François 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 complètes
de François Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Robert
Marichal, “René Du Puy et les Chicanous,” BHR 11
(1949): 129–66.
E. Bruce Hayes
BÉDA, NOËL (c. 1470–1537) A scholastic
theologian and leader of the Paris Faculty of The-
ology, Béda 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 protégé of the Flemish theologian Jan
Standonck, who reformed the Collège de Mon-
Béda, Noël 19
taigu in Paris for the purpose of producing dis-
ciplined clergy to reform the Church, Béda suc-
ceeded Standonck in 1504 as principal. Montaigu
flourished under his direction (pace Erasmus’s
colloquy “A Fish Diet” [1526]). After writing
three books in 1519–20 against humanist biblical
exegesis, Béda proposed reviving the office of
syndic in the Paris Faculty of Theology to im-
prove its ability to deal with controversial issues
and was elected to it. For the next fifteen years
he implemented a policy of censorship and re-
pression of reformers and humanists, arguing that
the humanists’ opposition to scholastic theology
and their philological approach to the Vulgate
Bible gave aid to heretics. Rabelais (P 7) satirizes
Béda as the author of De optimate triparum (On
the Excellence of Tripe). One author sees Rabe-
lais’s character Picrochole as, at a symbolic
level, a depiction of Noël Béda. The Parlement
of Paris allied itself with Béda and the Faculty
to form a conservative party that opposed re-
formers, humanists, and the tolerant stance of
King Francis I (who forbade the sale of Béda’s
Annotationes [1526] against Erasmus and Le-
fèvre d’Etaples). Undaunted, Béda led a Faculty
censure of Erasmus and published his Adversus
clandestinos Lutheranos (1529). Béda’s opposi-
tion in 1530–31 to the French king’s support for
King Henry VIII’s annulment, his campaign in
1533 to silence the preaching of Gérard Roussel
(a protégé 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., “Noël Beda and the
Humanist Reformation at Paris, 1504–1534” (Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University 1967); Walter Bense, Jr.,
“Noël Beda’s View of the Reformation,” Occasional
Papers of the American Society for Reformation Re-
search 1 (1977): 93–107; James K. Farge, “Beda,
Noël,” Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of The-
ology (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Stud-
ies, 1980): 31–36; James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Re-
form in Early Reformation France. The Faculty of
Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden: L. J. Brill,
1985); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole, est-il Noël Beda?”
ER 8 (1969): 13–25; Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His
20 Body, Representations of
Catholic Critics II: 1523–36 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf,
1989).
James K. Farge
BODY, REPRESENTATIONS OF A subject
matter that constitutes the basic framework of the
whole of Rabelais’s novels and figures in many
Renaissance works. The sixteenth century is
widely regarded as a period that engendered reas-
sessments in all fields of learning. Correspond-
ingly, humanist physicians amplified the anatom-
ical teachings bequeathed to the Renaissance
from antique sources (Aristotle, Hippocrates,
and Galen), to produce a more accurate repre-
sentation of human anatomy, one based on the
practice of dissection. The publication of such
works as A Short Introduction to Anatomy (1522)
by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi and On the Fab-
ric of the Human Body (1543) by Andreas Ve-
salius led to radical changes in the teaching of
medicine that challenged Galenism and assured
the dominance of this new anatomical science.
As a physician, known for his participation in
early anatomical dissections, Rabelais demon-
strated a medical and anatomical interest in the
body, which he readily transferred to his writ-
ings.
Representations of the body are omnipresent
in all four authentic books of Rabelais’s writings,
where they revolve around an imaginary family
of giants. Although many of these representa-
tions incline toward scatological or epistemolog-
ical musings delivered in hyperbolic form, all ex-
hibit rather remarkable forms of physicality.
Rabelais was fond of incorporating corporeal
themes such as birth, death, growth, deforma-
tion, dismemberment, castration, mutilation, out-
rageously monstrous figures, giants, and other
purely delusory bodies. In addition to exploiting
these bodily images for comic effect, Rabelais
frequently linked the passages to satire of the
scholastics, or employed them to expose contem-
porary political, philosophical, or religious dis-
putes.
In his Gargantua (G 3, 6) where the themes
of birth and the growth of giants prevail, Rabe-
lais presents physiological reflections on a pre-
posterous birth, which occurs not through the
conventional bodily orifice but instead through
the left ear. This parturition, occurring only after
eleven months, offers Rabelais the opportunity to
expose such contemporary debates as the ques-
tion of the length of a pregnancy, in order to
ascertain the legitimacy of a child. In subsequent
chapters, the alimentary, digestive, and excretory
routines of the young Gargantua’s body are ex-
amined. Self-absorbed in the physicality of child-
hood activities, the young prince is seen drink-
ing, eating, defecating, and urinating (G 11).
Elsewhere, he is observed searching, by trial and
error, for the perfect torche-cul or “arse-wipe” (G
13), in an episode linked to intellectual devel-
opment and satire of scholastic argumentation.
In the opening chapters describing Panta-
gruel’s birth (P 1–2), Rabelais continued to focus
on gigantification and on the genetic mutation
that engendered the race of giants. Clearly, Ra-
belais was inspired by the wide popular interest
in giants circulating in the early sixteenth cen-
tury, which included Annian (Giovanni Nanni,
1432?–1502), notions of the antediluvian giant
Noah, and other pseudohistories, including those
of Jean Lemaire de Belges.
Elsewhere in his Pantagruel, Rabelais devel-
ops a favorite corporeal leitmotif in a passage
focusing on bodily orifices and lower bodily
functions as he provides an example of a death
as irrational as the birth of Gargantua. In the
well-known passage, Panurge uses excrement as
a curative medicine in reattaching Epistémon’s
decapitated head (P 30). This combat injury had
allowed Epistémon to glimpse life in a postmor-
tem underworld “workhouse” and to return with
a report. In another episode noted more for its
political and philosophical implications than for
its sexual innuendos, female body parts are con-
sidered as potential building material as Panurge
discourses on his fantasy of rebuilding the walls
of Paris using women’s genitals (P 15). Gener-
ally, the female body is not physically visible in
Rabelais’s work but commonly appears as mis-
cellaneous sexual parts, as distortions of nature,
or in debates on the humanness of females.
The list of material bodily images found in
Rabelais’s work might be expanded with ease.
With its more learned discourse devoted to mar-
riage and reproduction, the Third Book exposes
a carnivalesque succession of monsters, fools,
oddities, and anomalies. In the more pessimistic
Fourth Book, the theme of death returns. By

means of an anatomical inquiry that elucidates
Renaissance anatomical and medical practices,
Rabelais performs a postmortem dissection of a
monstrous figure named Quaresmeprenant
(4BK 29–32).
Scholars have noted that the body Rabelais
represents in his writing, whether it be celebrated
or denigrated, is quintessentially grotesque and
open rather than classical and closed. To be sure,
Rabelais often relied on his extensive range of
bodily representations to reflect the cultural, po-
litical, and religious assumptions of his time and
to appeal to the diverse readers for whom the
books were ultimately destined.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival;
Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1990); Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining
Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998); Walter Stephens, Giants
in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1989).
Karen Sorsby
BOTTLE, DIVINE OR HOLY (DIVE BOU-
TEILLE) Oracular goal of Panurge’s matri-
monial quest in the Fourth and Fifth Books.
Seeking to know whether he should marry and,
if so, whether his wife will be faithful, Panta-
gruel’s roguish companion consults a variety of
expert opinions to no avail. He does attribute
meaning, however, to the empty bottle—origi-
nally a gift of wine from Panurge to his visitor—
that the fool Triboullet hands back to him (3BK
45). While Pantagruel interprets this gesture as a
sign that Panurge’s wife will be a drunkard, the
prospective bridegroom instead sees the bottle as
a referent to the Dive Bouteille, an oracle that
promises to resolve his matrimonial quandary
with a transcendent “mot” or “word” (3BK 47).
Located in Cathay in upper India (4BK 1), the
Bottle has the same ambiguous connotations that
are present in the narrator’s previous allusions to
drink: if on one hand it seems inscribed within
the Christian tradition, recalling the wine and
word of Christ, the drinking vessel also conjures
up images of Bacchic furor and everyday drunk-
enness. Lending its form in the Fourth Book to
the insignia on Pantagruel’s ship (4BK 1), the
Briçonnet, Guillaume 21
Bottle is finally revealed by the priestess Bacbuc
in the Fifth Book: and its long awaited “word,”
proffered in response to Panurge’s bottle-shaped
incantation, is the ambiguous directive to
“Drink!”
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, “The Hermetic and
Platonic Traditions in Rabelais’ Dive Bouteille,” SI 10
(1966): 15–29; G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dia-
lectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1969); Ray-
mond Mauny, “La Dive Bouteille et autres boutilles à
vin,” BAARD 3 (1973): 23–26; Flora Samuel, “Le Cor-
busier, Rabelais and the Oracle of the Holy Bottle,”
Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry,
17.4 (2001): 325–38; Florence Weinberg, The Wine
and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1972).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
BRIÇONNET, 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 Briçonnet began his career
with a position at the Cour des Comptes (Court
of Auditors) of Parlement and as the bishop of
Lodève. In 1507, he was named as abbot of Saint
Germain des Près. The ecclesiastical vocation
seems to have called to him with more insistence,
for he put enormous energies into reforming the
abbey during his tenure there. A skillful diplo-
mat, Briçonnet 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 Briçonnet’s time, few high-ranking
church officials remained in their dioceses, pre-
ferring a comfortable life at court. Thwarting
convention, the new bishop of Meaux took up
residence in Meaux. Leading by example, he en-
couraged his parish priests to do the same. He
denounced clerical depravity, promoted those
with a taste for learning, and created official
posts for preachers. Briçonnet’s vision of reform
was a complete program that touched the people,
places, and things around him.
Briçonnet garnered support from the French
22 Bridoye
court for his reforms. Letters to his protector
Marguerite de Navarre show a sensitive spiri-
tual guide. As he glosses Bible passages for his
royal correspondent, the sacred text springs to
life; each verse gains meaning for personal de-
velopment and the establishment of a relationship
with God through Christ. But Briçonnet’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, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Gérard
Roussel, François Vatable, and Michel d’Arande
to assist him. Along with a dynamic intellectual
life, Briçonnet nurtured service and spiritual ste-
wardship in his diocese. Preaching formed the
core of his program, but he also fought the Fran-
ciscans who responded with accusations of her-
esy.
Briçonnet 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 Lefèvre
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 idées re-
ligieuses de Guillaume Briçonnet, évêque de Meaux,”
Revue de théologie et des questions religieuses de
Montauban (1900): 318–58, 377–416; Guillaume Bri-
çonnet and Marguerite de Navarre, Correspondance
(1521–1524), 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1975–79); Lu-
cien Febvre, Le cas Briçonnet: idée d’une recherche
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1945); Henry Heller,
“Marguerite de Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,”
BHR 33 (1971): 271–310; Michel Veissière, Autour de
Guillaume Briçonnet (1470–1534) (Provins: Société
d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1967); Michel Veissière,
L’évêque Guillaume Briçonnet (1470–1534): contri-
bution à la connaissance de la Réforme catholique à
la veille du Concile de Trente (Provins: Société
d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1986).
Amy C. Graves
BRIDOYE An aging provincial judge, desig-
nated by Pantagruel as a representative of legal
learning to counsel Panurge (along with the the-
ologian Hippothadée, the doctor Rondibilis, and
the philosopher Trouillogan) on the question of
whether or not to marry (3BK 29, 36, 39–44).
What qualifies Bridoye for this role is presuma-
bly his extraordinary judicial record: of the more
than four thousand sentences he has handed
down over his long career, all have been found
equitable and none has ever been overturned on
appeal. Bridoye is unable to perform the advisory
function intended for him, however, because he
has been arraigned by the regional Parlement (the
“Parlement Myrelinguoys en Myrelingues”) on
charges that he handed down an inequitable sen-
tence against a certain Toucheronde. Questioned
by the president of the Parlement, Bridoye re-
veals that in his forty years on the bench he has
always sentenced by throwing dice, without ever
troubling to learn what is at issue in any of the
cases he has adjudicated. This astonishing reve-
lation creates a judicial dilemma for the Parle-
ment and its president, Trinquamelle: should Bri-
doye be condemned for his obvious judicial
incompetence, or should he be acquitted for his
remarkable record of equitable judgments? The
episode ends with a moving plea for pardon by
Pantagruel, and some highly contrived specula-
tions by Epistémon about the way Providence
may have intervened in Bridoye’s throws of the
dice.
Bridoye’s long, rambling testimony is one of
Rabelais’s greatest comic tours de force. Choked
with hundreds of highly technical references to
real statutes in civil and canon law and veering
constantly into irrelevant digressions, anecdotes,
and banalities, Bridoye’s speech brilliantly rep-
resents the self-satisfaction of a falsely learned
fool. Over the course of four dense and difficult
chapters (39–42) Bridoye flaunts an immense le-
gal learning while revealing that he understands
nothing at all of the law, citing at every turn laws
and legal tags that he consistently misinterprets
and misapplies. Bridoye’s most obvious and
comical failing is his naive literalism. For ex-
ample, he understands the common legal expres-
sion “alia judiciorum” (the risks and hazards of
litigation) literally to mean the “dice” with which
judges are required to arrive at their “judgments,”
and the principle that “semper in obscuris quod
minimum est sequimur” (obscure laws must al-
ways be interpreted and applied conservatively)
to mean that cases involving lots of paperwork
should be decided by small dice rather than large
dice. Such gross misinterpretations are comical

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 Episté-
mon’s favorable view of Bridoye’s manner of
doing so. There is in fact solid legal authority for
casting dice in undecidable cases where convic-
tion and acquittal would be equally justified. Bri-
doye himself cites (without understanding) many
authentic laws on this subject, but the cases he
decides do not meet any of their criteria for re-
course to dice. Nor does his method correspond
to the one supposed by Epistémon. His use of
dice cannot therefore be viewed as legitimate in
itself.
And yet because Bridoye’s method of judging
has inexplicably resulted in a perfect record of
good sentences, it is impossible to say that he is
guilty of malfeasance. It would seem that the
problem of interpreting Bridoye is precisely the
point of the episode and that Bridoye’s impor-
tance lies less in his methods of judging than in
the dilemma he poses as an object of judgment.
This dilemma is highlighted by Trinquamelle’s
perplexity at the end of the hearing, and even by
Bridoye’s own name. “Oison bridé” (“bridled
gosling”) was a common sixteenth-century ex-
pression for a “silly goose” or a fool. A “bride-
oie” (“goose bridler”) would therefore be a
maker of fools, a confounder of the wise who
defies the judgment even of Trinquamelle and the
areopagites of Myrelingues. Pantagruel’s solu-
tion to the aporia of Bridoye is to transcend it.
In recommending pardon rather than acquittal,
the hero refuses to judge altogether, preferring to
forgive rather than condemn the failings of a
fool, on the grounds that love alone fulfills the
law.
Readings: J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Rabelais’ Legal
Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963):
111–71; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva: Droz,
1997): 33–53; Charles Perrat, “Autour du juge Bri-
doye: Rabelais et le De Nobilitate de Tiraqueau,” BHR
Brief Declaration 23
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 DÉ-
CLARATION) “Brief Declaration (⫽ Clarifi-
cation) of Some of the More Obscure Terms
Contained in the Fourth Book of the Heroic
Deeds and Sayings of Pantagruel.” This is the
complete title in English translation of an anon-
ymous list attached to some copies of the 1552
edition of the Fourth Book. It contains 178 en-
tries, of which the majority (79) explain Greek
words and expressions, while the remaining part
explains, translates, or comments upon words
and expressions from other languages (Latin,
Italian, German, Hebrew, Arabic) as well as
French dialectic idioms. In comparison with the
text of the Fourth Book itself, this list often ap-
pears to be very useful, even necessary for a
good understanding of the work. But there are
also redundancies (for instance, lasanon has two
entries, both referring to the explanation given in
the text [“Lasanon: this term is explained
there”]), as well as explanations that are contra-
dictory to the significance the words have in the
text, the most problematic ones being parallèle,
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 André Tournon con-
tend that it is inauthentic, whereas for Mireille
Huchon its author is Rabelais. Marie-Luce De-
monet considers the list to be a satirical pastiche
by Rabelais on contemporary glossators and lex-
icographers. If the Brief Declaration is indeed
authentic and serious, it gives some interesting
autobiographical information on, for instance, the
lessons in Arabic Rabelais may have taken dur-
ing his stays in Rome (see the entry on Catad-
upes du Nil).
Readings: Raymond Arveiller, “La Briefve Decla-
ration est-elle de Rabelais?” ER 5 (1964): 9–10;
Marie-Luce Demonet, “Rabelais métalinguiste,” ER 37
(1999): 115–28; Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammair-
ien (Geneva: Droz, 1981): 406–11, 491–95; André
24 Bringuenarilles
Tournon, “La Briefve Declaration n’est pas de Rabe-
lais,” ER 13 (1976): 133–38.
Paul J. Smith
BRINGUENARILLES (4BK 17) One in a se-
ries of swallowing mouths and Fourth Book
monsters, Bringuenarilles is a superficially be-
nign and farcical enemy of the wind eaters who
consumes windmills and other detritus before
falling ill of a stomach ailment and dying. Iron-
ically, his death results not from the hardware he
has consumed, but rather from the cure pre-
scribed by doctors: a pat of butter, probably in-
tended to lubricate the pots and pans he has swal-
lowed, suffocates the giant. Linked by Alice
Berry to the “archetypal myth of the male made
pregnant by what he eats” (149–51), Bringuen-
arilles is a figure borrowed from the Disciple of
Pantagruel whose demise foreshadows the death
of Pan later in the narrative. As Michael Heath
points out, moreover, there is a potentially dark
side to this farcical episode: for windmills are
used in the production of flour, without which
the people will starve (101). Underneath the ve-
neer of fantasy, then, Rabelais links the theme of
unbridled consumption, which served in 1532 as
a positive figure of humanistic curiosity, to in-
equities of class and power.
Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-
trophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mi-
chael J. Heath, Rabelais (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996); Elizabeth Ches-
ney Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New
York: Macmillan/Twayne, 1993).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
BUDÉ, GUILLAUME (c. 1467–1540) Budé
is the greatest French humanist of the sixteenth
century. Geofroy Tory called him “the jewel of
the noble and studious Pharisees” (“diamant des
nobles & studieux Pharrisiens)” and set him
alongside Erasmus (with whom he frequently
corresponded), but he is hardly read today be-
cause he wrote almost exclusively in Latin. He
studied law, was secretary to the king from 1497
to 1515, and published translations as well as
original works. Of these, the three most impor-
tant are the “Annotations on the Pandects” (Di-
gest), the essential book of Roman Law (1508),
the De asse, a treatise on the Roman coin called
an as (c. 1515), and the “Passage from Hellenism
to Christianity” (1535), an impassioned plea for
“true” Christianity.
Budé is mentioned only once in the works of
Rabelais: in chapter 18 of the Fifth Book (OC
767), in a list of contemporary humanists dispar-
aged by the warriors of Quinte Essence. A Latin
letter from Rabelais to Budé has survived (OC
993–97, 1744–46); probably written in 1521, it
is Rabelais’s first known work, so we need not
be surprised by its obsequious tone. The two hu-
manists have more in common than we might
suspect; both were devout Christians of the kind
we now call “evangelical,” both were thoroughly
grounded in law as well as in ancient literature,
both were political conservatives and ardent sup-
porters of the monarchy.
Rabelais owes most to Budé’s De asse, whose
numerous editions in the sixteenth century attest
to its popularity. The first edition had 172 folios,
while the 1542 edition (quoted here) has 819
pages. Ostensibly a numismatic treatise in five
books, it is in fact a rambling discourse on money
and many other subjects, most notably religion,
good government, civilization, language and lit-
erature, and the glory of France. Budé’s special-
ized knowledge is staggering: he speaks of ancient
monetary systems, gems, ostentatious banquets,
and extravagance in general; of Roman history
and politics; of drinking measures, utensils and
habits; of astronomy, Egyptian hieroglyphics, an-
cient funerals, gardens, ships, and much, much
more. We may learn in passing about such dispa-
rate subjects as the price Marc Antony paid for the
severed head of Cicero, the boundaries of the Ro-
man Empire, the measurement of the earth,
French bread, and the lack of owls in Crete.
Budé is fond of underlining the lack of struc-
ture in his book (“Verùm 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. Budé quotes some
ancient jokes (facetiae) and would like to be
thought a “Democritus gelasinus” (792), but Ra-
belais’s debt to him is more obvious than that
and has yet to be thoroughly explored. Budé sup-
plied him with some important names: Panurgus
(239–40), Thalamegos (654), islands of the blest
called Macaron (750), as well as several terms
used in passing (Coraxian sheep, Pastophores,

Ucalegon, Arimaspien, Otacuste, celeusma, and
the Trojan Pig). And high on the list of both
authors’ aims is publicity for the intellectual su-
periority of France.
Readings: Guillaume Budé, Gulielmi Budaei Pari-
siensis, Consiliarii Regii, De asse et partibus eius libri
V (Lyon: Sebastien Gryphe, 1542); M.-M. de La Gar-
Budé, Guillaume 25
anderie, Christianisme et lettres profanes (1515–
1535): essai sur l’humanisme français (1515–1535) et
sur la pensée de Guillaume Budé, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Champion, 1995); David O. McNeil, Guillaume Budé
and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I (Geneva:
Droz, 1975).
Barbara C. Bowen
 C
CALUMNY Calumny can be considered in re-
lation to Rabelais in two ways: first, with refer-
ence to the attacks that his books received during
his lifetime, which he described as “calumnious”;
and second, with reference to how calumny can
be represented in these works. In both the pro-
logue to the first version of the Fourth Book
(1548) and in the dedicatory letter of the 1552
version, Rabelais attacked his critics whose ac-
cusations of heresy had almost stopped his writ-
ing. In chapter 32 of the 1552 Fourth Book, Pan-
tagruel explicitly condemns the “Demoniacles
Calvins imposteurs de Geneve,” “les enraigez
Putherbes” and “Maniacles Pistoletz”—three real
and virulent critics, John Calvin, the monk Ga-
briel de Puy-Herbault, and possibly Guillaume
Postel, figure in a list of fantastical monsters.
Rabelais’s most dangerous enemies, however,
and those for whom he reserved the most biting
satire, remained the theologians of the Sorbonne.
After the publication of the Third Book in 1546,
the Faculty of Theology reiterated its condem-
nation of Rabelais’s books, although all three re-
tained the royal privilege and were indeed re-
printed, with adjustments and revisions, after this
censure. An accusation of heresy was, of course,
a serious one; and Rabelais’s remark in the 1552
dedicatory letter that if he were guilty of heresy
as accused he would gather the wood for his own
pyre was by no means careless.
Rabelais possessed a number of strategies to
combat these “calumnious” accusations of
heresy. He had already modified his first two
books for the authorized editions of 1546, cutting
direct references to the Sorbonne and to any
“theologiens.” Francis I enjoyed and supported
the publication of the first books; Henry II sub-
sequently allowed the Third Book to be sold in
Paris despite the Sorbonne’s censure and the
Paris Parlement’s suspension of its sale. Rabe-
lais’s patrons, the du Bellay family, had by 1552
strengthened their influence; and the dedicatory
letter of the Fourth Book was addressed to the
cardinal de Châtillon, a powerful protector of
Christian humanists. In this letter, Rabelais
claimed that his books were simply “folastries
joyeuses” (joyful sport) that had been misinter-
preted and that any detection of heretical material
could only come from a perverse misreading and
willful misinterpretation, as, in the words of
Luke 11.11–12, “comme qui pain, interpretroit
pierre: poisson, serpent: oeuf, scorpion” (“as if
you interpreted bread to mean stone, fish to mean
serpent, or egg to mean scorpion” [4BK ded.]).
At the heart of the anxiety over calumny is, then,
an anxiety about interpretation and reading, a
return to the problem of interpretation famously
elaborated in the prologue to Gargantua. Cal-
umny represents another term in the reader’s in-
terpretation of a text, effectively separating
reader and text. Indeed, as Rabelais pointed out,
“l’esprit Calumniateur” is the spirit of discord
and the devil: in Greek, diabolos was originally
a calumniator, etymologically that which sepa-
rates and divides (4BK ded.). If it was in the
Fourth Book that Rabelais most explicitly de-
nounced those who attacked and calumniated his
work, the link between calumniators and the di-
abolical was already made in Pantagruel: the
censors at the Sorbonne criticized “diabliculant,
c’est à dire callumniant” (P 34).
Calumny thus runs counter to the Pantagrue-
line principle of interpreting all things in the best
and most charitable spirit: Pantagruel “toutes
choses prenoit en bonne partie, toute acte inter-
pretoit à bien” (“took all things in good part, in-
terpreted all actions favorably” [3BK 2]). Cal-
umny, false accusation, equally raises the
question of intention. Laughter at Rabelais’s
equivocations was never straightforward: Rabe-

lais was himself accused of calumny against the
monastic orders by Puy-Herbault, who clearly
read the “folastries joyeuses” as more biting sat-
ire. The continuing polemic over the Gargantua
prologue demonstrates that the question of inten-
tion and interpretation is still far from resolved.
Readings: Michel Charles, Introduction à l’étude
des textes (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Natalie Zemon Davis,
“Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s),” Rep-
resentations 32 (1990): 1–32; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin,
Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz,
1992); Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au
seizième siècle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1947); François Rigolot, L’erreur de la Ren-
aissance (Paris: Champion, 2002).
Emily Butterworth
CALVIN, JEAN OR JOHN (1509–64)
French-born reformer who was a prolific theo-
logian, preacher, and polemicist. His major work,
the oft-revised and expanded Institutio chris-
tianœ religionis or Institutes of the Christian Re-
ligion (first Latin edition, 1536; first French edi-
tion, 1541), lay the foundation for the French
Protestant or Reformed Church. Geneva, where
he settled permanently in 1541, was to become,
after considerable struggle, the Church’s epicen-
ter for the conversion of neighboring France. The
efforts of the French Calvinists or Huguenots
throughout the 1550s would culminate in several
decades of openly violent religious and civil con-
flict, starting in 1562. As Calvin was fifteen years
Rabelais’s junior, his considerable influence be-
gan too late to be reflected in Rabelais’s first two
major vernacular works, Pantagruel (1532) and
Gargantua (1534), in which current evangelical
and, to a lesser extent, Lutheran thought figure
prominently. In the later, “definitive” François
Juste edition of these works (Lyon, 1542), how-
ever, Rabelais does include derisive topical ref-
erences to “predestinators” and “imposters” (G
prol.), which critics have taken as evidence of
Rabelais’s negative reaction to the dissemination
of Calvinist doctrine.
The primary recorded connection (or confron-
tation) between Rabelais and Calvin came in
1550 with the publication of the Traité des scan-
dales, Calvin’s own vernacular translation of his
De scandalis (On Scandals), a virulent attack, as
its full title indicates, on those “who today pre-
Calvin, Jean or John 27
vent many people from coming to the pure doc-
trine of the Gospels and lead others astray from
it.” Although by no means taking him as his prin-
cipal target, Calvin does group Rabelais with
other influential humanist scholars, including
Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim
(1486–1535) and Etienne Dolet (1509–46),
whom he reviles for “proudly scorning the Gos-
pels” and “vomiting up their execrable blasphe-
mies against Jesus Christ and his teachings,” be-
fore singling him out: “the others, like Rabelais”
who “after having tasted of the Gospels, were
struck with a similar blindness,” occasioned by
their “diabolical pride.” Rabelais’s middle road
was essentially that of many other evangelical
humanists whom Calvin would label “moyen-
neurs” (moderates or moderators). However crit-
ical they were of contemporary Catholic institu-
tions, doctrine, and conduct, their relative
moderation was as unacceptable to Calvin as
Catholicism itself. Rabelais’s works were, in ad-
dition, all the more dangerous for their apparent
mocking tone, easily (mis)taken for rejection of
the sacred truths and of those who communicated
or interpreted them.
Rabelais had perhaps indirectly provoked Cal-
vin’s attack and even set its terms in the 1546
Third Book, with his definition of Pantagruel-
ism, arguably the overarching and unifying
moral philosophy of the chronicles, the tenets of
which include the injunction never to “se scan-
dalizer” (3BK 2). This can be understood in both
Rabelais’s and Calvin’s writings as “to turn away
(or to allow oneself to be turned away) from the
path of righteousness.” It is based on the Gospel
notion of the ska¬ndalon (skandalon), a “trap” or
“stumbling block,” that is, an impediment to
faith, an etymology that is developed at length in
Calvin’s treatise. In this very specific sense, Ra-
belais and Calvin each viewed the other and the
other’s understanding of and efforts toward re-
form as “scandalous.” Rabelais responded di-
rectly and in kind to Calvin’s treatise in the 1552
Fourth Book, classing the “Demoniacal Calvins,
imposters of Geneva” among “deformed and
misshapen monsters against Nature” (4BK 32).
Similarly, Calvin himself, as editor Olivier Fatio
notes in the most recent critical edition of the
Traité des scandales, continued the quarrel, at
least from the pulpit, even after Rabelais’s death
28 Carnival
in 1553 (see also Evangelism; Reformation;
Religion).
Readings: Jean Calvin, Des scandales, ed. Olivier
Fatio (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Lucien Febvre, Le prob-
lème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La Religion de
Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942); Alban J.
Krailsheimer, Rabelais (Les écrivains devant Dieu)
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967); Michael Screech,
Rabelais and the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangel-
ism, Reformation, Dissent (Baden-Baden/Bouxwiller:
Valentin Koerner, 1992).
Jeff Persels
CARNIVAL In the pre-Reformation liturgical
calendar, Shrove Tuesday (the day when the
faithful were shriven, that is, confessed their sins
and had them forgiven) and Ash Wednesday
marked the beginning of the penitential season of
Lent, forty days of prayer and fasting in prepa-
ration for Easter. But in the observances of lay-
people and junior clerics, a period of days or
even weeks culminating in Shrove Tuesday (also
called Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday) was given the
name of Carnival (derived by some from the
Low Latin Carne vale, goodbye to meat) and de-
voted to celebrations and physical indulgence of
various kinds. In many places, similar celebra-
tions marked the twelve days between Christmas
and the Feast of Kings (January 6), and a good
number of the rituals discussed in modern writ-
ing as examples of Carnival in fact belonged to
the winter celebration. Carnival food ideally con-
sisted of meat, particularly fat meat, sausages,
eggs, butter, and cheese—all the foods forbidden
in Lent, when the faithful were supposed to sub-
sist on fish, cereals, and vegetables. Carnival ob-
servances were often of an apparently subversive
kind: at feasts, someone might be designated by
lot as king for a day and allowed to give orders
to his social superiors. Some towns or courts
even chose a “Lord of Misrule,” while in some
cathedrals a Boy Bishop was chosen from among
the choristers to go up into the pulpit and preach
a facetious sermon while other junior clerics per-
formed a parody of the usual rites. The text for
the Boy Bishop’s sermon was usually “Stultorum
numerus infinitus” (“the number of fools is infi-
nite” [Ecclesiastes 1.15]), and the pre-Lenten
Carnival season was often marked by the meet-
ings of fool-societies and the acting of plays in
fools’ costume.
Another type of play for which several scripts
survive is a battle between Carnival, personified
as a fat, jolly Father-Christmas-type figure, and
Lent, a thin, kill-joy female figure, and their re-
spective followers, armed on the one hand with
chickens and sausages and on the other with
leeks and salt herrings. Lent has to win, but she
is reminded that her reign will last only six
weeks, after which plenty and jollity will return.
All these observances seem to flout received wis-
dom (for a few days, children and madmen will
be allowed to teach adults and the sane), and nor-
mal decorum and common sense (men may dress
as women or animals, women as men, “indecent”
acts are permitted, food is consumed in unaccus-
tomed quantity or wasted entirely by being
thrown at the other side in the “battle” plays).
Such observances as these might seem to express
popular resentment against rulers and the Church
which closely ordered people’s lives. Recent his-
torians, however, have questioned how subver-
sive these rituals actually were, and some have
argued that by confining reversals of power to a
limited season and to these well-established tra-
ditional forms, Carnival in fact acted as a safety
valve which helped ensure the survival of tradi-
tional authority.
In the Fourth Book, chapters 29–42, Rabelais
gives a lengthy description first of Quaresme-
prenant (Lent, or more accurately, “Lent-
coming-on,” the beginning of Lent) represented
as a bizarre, forbidding hybrid monster, and then
of his traditional enemies, the Andouilles (tripe-
sausages). The personified sausages have as their
god a flying pig, and their war-cry is “Mardi
gras!” A strange misunderstanding means that
Pantagruel and his men, despite their initial
friendly approaches (“Vostres, vostres, vostres
sommes-nous trestous,” they cry; “we are at your
service one and all” [4BK 41]), find themselves
fighting against the Andouilles rather than
against Quaresmeprenant, but after the interven-
tion of the flying pig the conflict is resolved and
a new friendship established.
These chapters are plainly based upon tradi-
tional Carnival rituals, but some critics, most no-
tably Mikhail Bakhtin, have argued that many
more elements in the book are inspired by a car-

nival, or “carnivalesque” spirit: that is, one of
irreverence, privileging of the physical, and even
intellectual or political subversion.
It was in his study of Dostoevsky, published
in 1929, that Bakhtin introduced the notion of
“carnivalesque” writing and the idea that subjects
could be “carnivalized.” He developed these
ideas at length in his study of Rabelais (Tvor-
chestvo Fransua Rable, written between 1935
and 1940 but not published until 1965 in Rus-
sian, and then translated into both English and
French in the opportune year of 1968). Despite
questioning by historians of Bakhtin’s historical
account of Carnival as an institution, his critical
notion of the carnivalesque has had a consider-
able influence in recent critical writing in Eng-
lish.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); “Carnivalization/carnivalesque,” A Dic-
tionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed.
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998); Carol Clark, The
Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: Pressgang, 1983); Samuel
Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Carol Clark
CARTIER, JACQUES Although travel be-
comes a major theme of his work only in the
Fourth Book, Rabelais displays considerable in-
terest in voyages of exploration as early as the
Pantagruel (1532) where, at least until its final
stage, Pantagruel’s return journey to Utopia rep-
licates the route taken by the Portuguese to reach
the Indies (24), and where in chapter 32 Panurge
discovers in Pantagruel’s mouth a “new world.”
Since the structure of the Third Book (1546)
does not allow for any sort of sea voyage, it is
only with the appearance of the Fourth Book that
we are once again in the domain of travel. In-
deed, throughout this and the Fifth Book, Pan-
tagruel and his companions sail from island to
island in search of the Oracle of the Dive Bou-
teille or Divine Bottle. It becomes obvious at the
beginning of the Fourth Book that Rabelais has
at least heard about and possibly read some of
the accounts of Cartier’s three journeys to Can-
ada (1534, 1535, 1541), since the ships of Pan-
tagruel’s fleet sail from Saint-Malo in search of
a shortcut to Cathay. This was precisely the goal
Cartier, Jacques 29
of Cartier’s expeditions, since he wanted to give
the French an advantage over the Portuguese and
Spanish who were deriving considerable eco-
nomic gain from their trade routes to the East via
the Cape of Good Hope. It is interesting to note
that the account of Cartier’s first journey in 1534
was first published in Italian (Venice, 1556) and
was published in France (Rouen, 1598) only after
being retranslated into French. The account of
the second expedition was published much ear-
lier (Paris, 1545), although a manuscript version
of this text also exists and was perhaps given to
Francis I before this date. Cartier’s second voy-
age also departed from Saint-Malo and, like that
of Pantagruel, was preceded by a service of wor-
ship.
In his analysis of the relationship between Ra-
belais and Cartier, Abel Lefranc suggests that
Cartier’s influence on Rabelais was direct and
far-reaching. Following the lead of Margry’s
French Navigations of the Maritime Revolution
from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century (Les
navigations françaises de la Révolution maritime
du XIVe au XVIe siècle [Paris, 1867]), he identifies
Jamet Brayer, the captain of Pantagruel’s fleet,
as Jacques Cartier, on the rather slim evidence
that “Jamet” is a familiar form of Jacques. (Other
scholars have found a Jamet Brayer among Ra-
belais’s relatives.) However, Lefranc goes even
further than Margry, suggesting that Rabelais
could well have consulted Cartier in person.
Lefranc bases this hypothesis on the work of a
local historian, Jacques Dorement of Saint-Malo,
who claims that Rabelais came to Saint-Malo not
only to learn the details of Cartier’s voyages, but
also to familiarize himself with the technical sail-
ing and navigational terms that would subse-
quently appear in the Fourth Book (Lefranc
1984: 59–60). This would certainly help to
explain the extensive nautical knowledge Rabe-
lais displays in this work, although Rabelais
could also have acquired this knowledge from
treatises on navigation and seamanship, as well
as accounts of sea voyages. However, what is
certain is that Rabelais intends the Fourth Book
to pay homage to the exploits of Jacques Cartier,
perhaps out of admiration and personal contact
with the navigator, but undoubtedly because he
wished to endorse the political dimension of Car-
30 Castiglione, Baldassare
tier’s expeditions, undertaken to further the
king’s political aspirations in New France.
Readings: Marius Barbeau, Pantagruel in Canada
(Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1984); Jean-
Philippe Beaulieu, “La Description de la nouveauté
dans les récits de voyage de Cartier et de Rabelais,”
RAR 9.2 (1985):104–110; Kim Campbell, “Of Horse,
Fish, and Frozen Words,” RAR 14.3 (1990): 183–92;
Jacques Cartier, Brief Recit . . . (Rouen, 1545);
Jacques Cartier, Discours du voyage fait par le capi-
taine Jaques Cartier . . . (Rouen, 1598); Jacques Do-
remont, De l’antiquité de la ville et cité 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 études canadien-
nes en France 10.17 (1984): 221–23.
Lance Donaldson-Evans
CASTIGLIONE, BALDASSARE (1478–1529)
Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano first appeared in print
in 1528, well in time for Rabelais to have dis-
covered it when visiting Italy. The classical
scholar Jacques Collin penned the first surviving
French translation (1537), and Mellin de Saint-
Gelais and Etienne Dolet collaborated on the re-
vised Lyonnais edition of 1538. The work gen-
erated intense interest, both favorable and hostile.
While Rabelais quotes it at least once (3BK 29),
Pauline Smith opines correctly that his work con-
tains little anticourtier satire such as the Corte-
giano stimulated and may indeed have sought to
nullify via the ideal figure it portrays. Neverthe-
less, the Third Book passage is significant both
as prefacing the erudite symposium to follow and
as cueing yet another hostile judgement on Pan-
urge. Paraphrasing the words of Castiglione’s
character Giuliano, Panurge questions the value
of asking advice (a) from theologians, most of
whom are heretics, (b) from doctors, who uni-
versally abhor medication, and (c) from lawyers,
who never sue one another. Such words are those
of a courtisan, says Pantagruel, who (going be-
yond Castiglione) combines seriousness and in-
genuity in answering the charges. Good theolo-
gians extirpate heresy by inciting faith; good
doctors rely on prophylaxis, thereby preempting
any need for cures; meanwhile, good lawyers are
too busy pleading for others to take up their own
affairs. Panurge makes no answer and acquiesces
in Pantagruel’s ultimately fruitless dinner-party
plan.
The charge of courtisanie may be significant,
however. Is Rabelais associating Panurge’s re-
duced status as Pantagruel’s sycophant with at-
titudes that Castiglione presents with approval?
Some editors imply this strongly. M. A. Screech,
for instance, observes that “evidently R[abelais]
feels very little sympathy for the ideals of the
Courtisan.” However, in pulling the joke back
into a serious context, Pantagruel is merely add-
ing a moralistic gloss to a Renaissance topos that
Castiglione (and Panurge) had chosen to treat
comically. It is for the reader to say, here as else-
where in the text, which perspective appeals
more: Panurge’s irreverence or Pantagruel’s
conscientiousness. Undeniably, however, the di-
alogues orchestrating the Cortegiano and Rabe-
lais’s work, especially the Third Book, are both
similar and different. They share a spirit of free
debate, an avowed debt to classical precedent,
and an atmosphere of enlightenment and relaxa-
tion. Rabelais differs from Castiglione in all but
excluding female voices, in dramatizing his
themes via Panurge’s behavior, and in spending
far less time theorizing humor than practicing it.
Readings: Sydney Anglo, “The Courtier. The Ren-
aissance and Changing Ideals,” The Courts of Europe,
ed. Arthur G. Dickens (London: Thames and Hudson,
1977); Richard Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Ra-
belais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Mi-
chael A. Screech, ed., Le tiers livre (Geneva: Droz,
1964); Pauline M. Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in
Sixteenth Century French Literature (Geneva: Droz,
1966).
John Parkin
CENSORS AND CENSORSHIP The Age of
Print increased the volume and speed of the cir-
culation of ideas, and that in turn necessitated
new mechanisms for the control of those ideas.
The earliest measures in that direction were taken
by the popes Innocent VIII and Alexander VI at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, consoli-
dated by the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515. The
concern was with religious control, not (as later)
with the control of pornography.
In France, the mechanism of censorship was
installed only slowly. In March 1521, King
Francis I, in response to a request from the rec-

tor of the University of Paris, instructed the Par-
lement to forbid the printing of books on relig-
ious questions without inspection by the Faculty
of Theology of the University of Paris (the “Sor-
bonne” to those who did not like it); the Parle-
ment duly complied, in an edict dated March 21,
1521. This already shows the main parties in the
censorship process: the theologians could pass
doctrinal judgments on suspect texts, but they
had no power to enforce a condemnation. For
that they needed the civil magistrates of the Par-
lement who could order the confiscation of books
and the banishment, or burning, of persons. But
the magistrates always needed to avoid offending
the monarch, who could transfer a case to his
Privy Council (which normally delivered verdicts
pleasing to His Majesty). As long as Faculty,
Parlement, and king were in agreement, censor-
ship could work; but when Francis I favored hu-
manists like Erasmus, Louis de Berquin, or Le-
fèvre d’Etaples, representatives of a movement
that the Sorbonne detested, conflict could arise;
this happened notably in 1523, 1526, and 1533.
The gravity and the exact nature of these con-
flicts is a subject of debate: James Farge argues
that the Faculty was always the respected guard-
ian of religious orthodoxy, that the Parlement
systematically supported the Faculty, and that the
problem was the inconsistent attitude of the king
and his protection of “humanists.” Francis Hig-
man disagrees on all three points.
The 1521 edict was designed to control book
production at its source: permission had to be
obtained before a manuscript text was printed.
This was inadequate, since books were fre-
quently printed without the necessary permission,
and foreign printings could not be controlled in
this way. Already by 1526 edicts were issued de-
manding that copies of vernacular translations of
Scripture and certain other texts be handed in to
the authorities. A new step in 1531 was the prac-
tice of searches in suspect bookshops. The Af-
faire des Placards in October 1534 provoked an
outburst of book-burning and executions, as well
as the famous edict of January 13, 1535 banning
all printing in the French kingdom.
Until 1540, censorship involved examination
of a text, quotation of heretical propositions, and
explanation of the condemnation (often just
“plainly Lutheran”). But after 1540 the size of
Censors and Censorship 31
the problem changed dramatically, and the proc-
ess of censorship evolved accordingly. The the-
ologians took to drawing up lists of titles, with-
out detailed explanations. A first list, made “at
the request of the Parlement” between Christmas
1542 and March 2, 1543, involved forty-three ti-
tles in French and twenty-two in Latin. This list
remained in manuscript form; however, its exis-
tence was known, and several authorities in the
French provinces requested copies of it. This was
one of the reasons given by the theologians in
1544 for the decision to publish a Catalog of the
Books Censored by the Paris Faculty of Theol-
ogy (Catalogue des livres censurez par la faculté
de Theologie de Paris [Paris, Benoist Prevost for
Jean André, 1544]). The list includes 230 titles—
109 in Latin and 121 in French. This world pre-
mière of a printed Index of forbidden books was
backed by the spiritual authority of the Faculty;
but there was no means of enforcing that au-
thority. In 1545 the Inquisitor Matthieu Ory pro-
posed that the list be republished with the back-
ing of an edict from the Parlement; the edict
appeared on June 23, 1545, and the related edi-
tion of the Catalogue on July 20, 1545 (with con-
tents identical to the 1544 edition except for the
addition of four mixed items at the end). It is this
version of the Catalogue, backed by its edict,
which represents the first authoritative list of
condemned works.
Further editions of the Parisian Catalogue ap-
peared in 1547, with eighty-four new condem-
nations (thirty-six in Latin, forty-eight in
French); 1549 (thirty-one new titles in Latin and
four in French); 1551 (thirty-one new titles in
Latin, eighteen in French); and 1556 (seventy-
two new titles in Latin, sixty in French). No new
lists were published in France after this date,
though the Faculty decided individual condem-
nations; the Catalogues were replaced by the Ro-
man Index from 1557 on.
In France, the Edict of Châteaubriant (1551)
comprehensively summarized censorship dispo-
sitions to that date. All printed books, it stated,
should carry the name of the author and of the
printer, the printer’s address and mark, and the
date of printing. Regular inspections of book-
shops were to be held, in which the Catalogue
should be available alongside the list of books on
sale. The import of foreign books was to be
32 Cervantes, Miguel de
closely controlled, and new works would require
a certificate from the Theology Faculty before
permission to print was granted. And so on.
The development of this censorship system co-
incides with the period of Rabelais’s intellectual
activity. There are three points of contact. First,
in 1524 Rabelais, then a Franciscan friar, had
certain books in Greek confiscated by his relig-
ious superiors. This was an internal matter to the
Franciscan order, not based on an official eccle-
siastical decree. Second, despite many statements
to the contrary, it seems that Pantagruel was not
condemned by the Sorbonne in 1533. Our only
source on the subject, a letter from John Calvin
to François Daniel of Orléans (October 1533),
reports on the row within the University con-
cerning Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir de
l’ame pecheresse; Nicolas Le Clerc, representa-
tive of the theologians, protests that Marguerite’s
work was not condemned by the Faculty depu-
ties, but certain other works should have been—
like Pantagruel, the Sylva cunnorum and similar
works. It would seem that Le Clerc wanted to
denounce Rabelais’s novel not for heresy but for
obscenity (a criterion not otherwise evident in the
period); Calvin adds a comment concerning Le
Clerc’s evident ignorance—implying perhaps
that the significant message in Pantagruel con-
cerns the Saint-Victor library rather than Pan-
urge’s pranks. In any case, no censure of Ra-
belais’s work dates from this period.
Third, the first certain evidence of a condem-
nation of Rabelais’s works is in the list of 1542/
3, where the final item (apart from a later addi-
tion) is: “Grandes Annales tres-veritables des
gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua et Pan-
tagruel Roy des Dipsodes.” This must refer not
to the original editions of 1532 and 1534, but to
the combined edition by [Pierre de Tours],
[Lyon], 1542– in which the attacks on the “Sor-
bonagres” and so on have been watered down.
In 1544, the same title is transcribed; in addition,
there is the condemnation of “Pantagruel et Gar-
gantua” (which is transcribed into the Anvers
Index of 1570 and sqq., and thence to the Spanish
and Roman lists). In the 1547 Catalogue, the
Third Book of Pantagruel is added. The Fourth
Book, which caused so much difficulty for Ra-
belais, does not appear on any of the lists of cen-
sured books.
Readings: Jesus Martinez de Bujanda et al., Index
des livres interdits. Vol. 1: Index de l’Université de
Paris, 1544, 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, 1556 (Sher-
brooke: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance, 1985);
James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Ref-
ormation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris,
1500–1543 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Francis Hig-
man, Censorship and the Sorbonne. A Bibliographical
Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of
Theology of the University of Paris, 1520–1551 (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1979).
Francis Higman
CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616)
Spanish novelist whose masterpiece Don Quijote
displays many affinities of narrative technique
and verbal exuberance with Rabelais’s work. Al-
though Cervantes is unlikely to have had any di-
rect knowledge of Rabelais, both authors shared
an enthusiasm for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,
and both made crucial contributions to the de-
velopment of Renaissance comic narrative. Crit-
icism has acknowledged the prominent role of
proverbial speech in both authors as well as their
predilection for lexical experimentation and lin-
guistic parody. Each author conceives his work
in part as a parody of chivalric romance, and
each resorts to linguistic means to reveal the
anachronism of the chivalric tradition.
One technique that the two authors share is a
burlesque form of verisimilitude that they may
have borrowed from Ariosto. Like Rabelais’s
narrator Alcofrybas Nasier, Cervantes’s narrator
Cide Hamete Benengeli recounts the most im-
plausible and fantastic events with rigorous pre-
cision and an indignant pretension to the strictest
veracity. This parodic technique, known in Ari-
osto studies as the Turpin method, allows Ra-
belais and Cervantes to assert the autonomy of
fiction from historical criteria of truth and false-
hood.
Readings: Helmut Hatzfeld, El “Quijote” como
obra de arte del lenguaje (Madrid, 1966); Eric
MacPhail, “The Ethic of Timing and the Origin of the
Novel: Speaking Too Soon in Rabelais and Cervan-
tes,” Symposium 52 (1998): 155–64; Eleanor O’Kane,
“The Proverb: Rabelais and Cervantes,” CL 2 (1950):
360–69; Sergio Zatti, Il “Furioso” fra epos e romanzo
(Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1990).
Eric MacPhail

CHANEPH (4BK 63–64) Chaneph (meaning
“hypocrisy” in Hebrew) is the name of the pe-
nultimate island encountered in the Fourth
Book. The episode begins by relating a moment
of deathly calm (the lack of wind causing a stag-
nation of the joyful quest, Pantagruel and his
companions dozing in lethargy). Frère 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). Epistémon informs the Pantagruelists on the
Island of Chaneph and its sinister habitants. Dur-
ing a copious banquet-lunch, the initial lethargy
quickly disappears; the habitual joy and linguistic
virtuosity are returning as is clear from the in-
sertion of other discourses: anecdotes, rhymes,
and a long, alphabetic list of venomous animals
(4BK 64). Finally, Pantagruel answers the ques-
tion asked by Frère Jean, by pointing the atten-
tion of the others to what is happening during the
banquet: with the raising of the spirits, the wind
has risen “by occult sympathy.” Pantagruel
promises to tell more about it “elsewhere and at
another time.” The episode ends with Panta-
gruel’s cheerful reflexion on Bacchic furor (4BK
65).
For Edwin Duval, this episode belongs to the
threefold sequence of increasingly dangerous an-
ticaritas (Gaster, Chaneph, Ganabin) which con-
cludes the Fourth Book. The episode itself is
based on the opposition of the banqueting com-
panions and the dreadful habitants of Chaneph.
Modern critics of the episode are largely in-
debted to V.-L. Saulnier’s seminal interpretation
of this opposition: Chaneph represents an “anti-
Thelema” opposed to the merry company of the
Pantagruelians whose feasting echoes the depar-
ture’s banquet, related in the opening chapter of
the Fourth Book. Saulnier also stresses the allu-
sion to the Last Supper and the christological im-
pact of Pantagruel, who seems to repeat Christ’s
eschatological words during the Last Supper
(John 16.12–25).
Other critics underscore the allusions to the
practice and significance of the Holy Mass (E.
Charity 33
Duval) with Pentecostal undertones: the (twelve)
companions assembled sadly together, their glad-
ness caused by the raising of the wind (spiritus),
their apparent drunkenness and their linguistic in-
spiration (glossolaly) remind readers of the story
of Pentecost, Acts 2.1–47 (P. J. Smith). Other
thematic impacts and intertextual allusions are
visible in this hybrid episode: its place in the
overall theme of the wind (the death calm being
opposed to the Fourth Book’s tempest scene),
the insertion of dialogue (allusions to Erasmus’s
Convivium religiosum), natural history (borrow-
ings from medical manuals on poisonous ani-
mals), and classical mythology (the myth of the
Winged Bacchus).
Readings: Paul Delaunay, “Les animaux venimeux
dans Rabelais,” Mélanges Abel Lefranc (Paris: Droz,
1936); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cène, et le voy-
age sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–40;
Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Li-
vre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Verdun-L.
Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquête.
Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquième livre (Paris:
SEDES, 1982); Michael A. Screech, “The Winged
Bacchus (Pausanias, Rabelais and Later Emblema-
tists),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 43 (1980): 259–62; Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écri-
ture. Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva:
Droz, 1987).
Paul J. Smith
CHARITY Caritas, the Latin equivalent of
agape or love, the highest of the three Christian
virtues (faith, hope, charity) according to a tra-
dition originating in Saint Paul (1 Cor. 13.13).
“Charity” in the biblical sense of “brotherly
love” is the moral foundation of the Christian
religion and the single commandment of the New
Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself” (Matt. 22.39). As such, it fulfills and
supersedes the entire Law of the Old Testament:
“He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.
. . . Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore
love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13.8–10;
cf. Gal. 5.14). The “golden rule” (Matt. 7.12) and
Christ’s various injunctions not to judge (Matt.
7.1–5) but to forgive (Matt. 6.12) and to love
even one’s enemies (Matt. 5.43–48) are all ex-
pressions of the single law of charity.
Much in Rabelais’s books is predicated on the
34 Charles V
ideal of Christian charity, including Panta-
gruel’s role in restoring friendship to the feud-
ing litigants Baisecul and Humevesne and in re-
placing the fratricidal reign of Anarche with a
utopian reign of brotherly love in Dipsodie (Pan-
tagruel), Grandgousier’s attempts to buy peace
from his aggressive neighbor Picrochole and
Gargantua’s institution of the Abbey of Thé-
lème in which everyone defers to the wishes of
all (Gargantua), Pantagruel’s abiding love for
the wastrel Panurge and his forgiveness of the
incompetent judge Bridoye (Third Book), and
Pantagruel’s repeated attempts to befriend ene-
mies and to broker peace between antagonistic
forces (Fourth Book). Although all of Rabelais’s
books promote the ideal of a tolerant, all-
inclusive brotherhood based on charity, they
show an increasing tendency to favor love over
knowledge as the remedy for all the ills of a
post-lapsarian world, and to encourage in the
reader a particular form of charity called Pan-
tagruelism.
Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991); Ulrich Langer, “Charity and the Singular: The
Object of Love in Rabelais,” Nominalism and Literary
Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Christoph Bode,
Hugo Keiper, and Richard J. Utz, Critical Studies 10
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); François Rigolot, “Ra-
belais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical In-
tertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplar-
ity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 225–37.
Edwin M. Duval
CHARLES V (1500–58) Considered the
greatest of the Hapsburg emperors, Charles V de-
veloped an empire on which “the sun never set.”
Spain, South America, the Low Countries, Na-
ples, Sicily, and parts of Austria made up his
kingdom. Rival and adversary to the French
kings Francis I and Henry II, Charles is best
known for his simultaneous promotion of Cath-
olic reform and his fight against Protestantism.
The conquest of Mexico and Peru became ar-
guably his most lasting legacy. Having aban-
doned his titles, Charles V retired in 1556 to a
monastery in Yuste, Spain.
The choleric Picrochole found in Gargantua
(1534) is Rabelais’s caricature of Charles V.
Gargantua appeared within a decade of a series
of defeats for the French at the hands of Charles
V: Francis I’s loss in the election to Holy Roman
emperor, his decisive defeat in the Battle of Pa-
via, his subsequent imprisonment, and finally the
taking of his two oldest sons as hostages. Picro-
chole (the very name meaning “bitter bile”)
serves as a foil to Rabelais’s wise giant-kings,
Grandgousier and his son Gargantua. Rabelais
features the enlightened humanistic and Christian
upbringing received by Gargantua in the first half
of the book. It is a dramatization of Erasmus’s
1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (In-
stitutio principis christiani), which had been
written with Prince Charles, the future Charles
V, in mind. In contrast, Picrochole’s irrational
behavior presented in the latter half of Gargan-
tua offers a primer of how a king should not
behave. The absurd war begun over a dispute
between bakers and shepherds also serves to
highlight Gargantua’s rise to leadership and
hence manhood. Picrochole is both a cautionary
example of an unwise king and a richly devel-
oped comical character. Picrochole’s dominant
role as a ridiculous adversary but one that the
giants must take seriously may well reveal the
anxiety the French felt over Charles V’s power
and foreshadows the resumption of hostilities be-
tween Francis I and Charles in 1536.
Readings: Margaret Harp, “Charles V as Picrochole
in Rabelais’s Gargantua,” Young Charles V 1500–
1531 (New Orleans: University Press of the South,
2000); Royall Tyler, The Emperor Charles the Fifth
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1956).
Margaret Harp
CHELI (4BK 10) An island encountered by
Pantagruel and his companions in the Fourth
Book, chapter 10. The island’s name is borrowed
from Hebrew and is in direct correlation with
the content of the chapter. Cheli (pronunciation,
kli) is the biblical word for “pots and pans.” In-
deed, the seemingly culinary chapter recounts
Frère Jean’s enthusiastic visit to King Panigon’s
kitchens. Under the guise of setting up an argu-
ment on the merit of “cooking matters” versus
that of kissing ladies, the chapter introduces one
of the various kabbalistic keys to be found in the
Fourth Book. Because of the proximity of the
word Cheli to other hermetically opaque terms
such as Ruach, Tohu, Bohu, and Belimah, one

can envision that beyond the immediate transla-
tion of Cheli as “pots and pans,” Rabelais hides
a motif pertaining to speculative kabbala. While
Belimah is a term attached to the Sephiroth, or
“numbers,” Cheli is linked to esoteric elabora-
tions about Creation. It is associated with the var-
ious steps of the creation of beings and forms in
the Divine plan and their ideal hierarchy. Ac-
cording to the Shevirath HaKelim, or “breaking
of the Vases,” during the creation of the material
world, divine light sprang forth in various stages.
In one of these stages, light beamed from the first
being, Adam Kadmon. This light was captured
and kept in special vases (kelim or cheli), some
of which broke when hit by sudden light. Laden
with hermetic value, the metaphor of the Cheli,
or cups or vases, through which God acts, is
present at the beginning and at the end of the
companions’ journey—at the end, since the ul-
timate goal of the Fourth Book is to reach Bac-
buc, the Divine Bottle, the divine recipient; at
the onset, because an emblem akin to a vase is
symbolically reproduced on eleven out of the
twelve ships (bouteille, hanat, potet, brocq,
bourrabaquin, entonnoir, guoubelet, brinde,
breusse, portouoire, barrault).
Readings: Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988);
Gershom G. Scholem, Les grands courants de la mys-
tique juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); François Secret, Les
Kabbalistes chrétiens 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 à tout le poil”). Their name is derived
from the root word chicane, or chicanery. They
are in fact process-servers, often collecting dam-
ages for the beatings they receive while harassing
nobles. This curious encounter leads Panurge to
tell the story of Lord Basché’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 Basché so that he will beat them and
then be charged with having assaulted officers of
the crown. Basché circumvents the system by
holding a mock wedding party when the Chican-
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 35
ous arrive. As part of the festivities, guests play-
fully hit each other. This tradition is taken to ex-
tremes, and on three different occasions, the
“wedding guests” gruesomely beat the Chican-
ous. While Pantagruel and Epistémon condemn
Basché’s excessive actions, Frère Jean decides
to test it himself and pays a Chicanou and then
beats him (4BK 16). The Chicanous’ harassment
of Lord Basché 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 complètes
de François Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Robert
Marichal, “René Du Puy et les Chicanous,” BHR 11
(1949): 129–66.
E. Bruce Hayes
CHITTERLINGS See Andouilles (Chitterlings,
Sausages)
CHRONIQUES GARGANTUINES See Gar-
gantuan Chronicles
CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS (106–43 B.C.)
Noted Roman statesman, lawyer, philosopher,
and orator who was revered by humanists and
heralded as a master of eloquence. Ciceronian
rhetoric, characterized by florid language, peri-
odic sentences, extensive amplification, and
overstatements used for persuasive purposes, was
a mainstay of learned discourse throughout the
Renaissance. The Gallic doctor’s own use of
lofty, erudite rhetoric, described by Donald
Frame as “more or less Ciceronian” (142), is par-
ticularly evident in his neo-Latin correspon-
dence and in speeches (G 29, 50) and letters (P
8, G 29) in the chronicles, which differ markedly
in style and tonality from the exuberant prose,
outrageous scatology, and carnivalesque banter
popularly associated with Rabelais. As a result,
Rabelais’s Ciceronian passages, viewed by some
readers as models of sincerity and earnestness,
strike others as ponderous and heavy-handed—
diametrically at odds with the “natural” speech
that Pantagruel advocates in P 6. This interpre-
tive quarrel yields radically different readings of
key texts: taken seriously, Gargantua’s letter on
learning (P 8) represents a manifesto of human-
istic pedagogy; but its inflated style, similar in
many ways to Rabelais’s “mock serious” dis-
36 Clothes
course, leaves open the possibility that he is ei-
ther parodying or interrogating the aging giant’s
ambitions for his son.
Textual allusions to Ciceronian rhetoric do lit-
tle to resolve this ambiguity. When the author
compares Eudemon to Cicero (G 15), our first
impression is positive. Yet the youth is painfully
effete, and his ornate language and eloquent
voice, unnatural in a child of twelve, make Gar-
gantua “cry like a cow.” The veiled satire of this
episode sets the stage for overt mockery in chap-
ter 39 of Gargantua where Frère Jean, accused
of taking God’s name in vain, defends his moral
lapse on rhetorical grounds, claiming the swear
words are “Ciceronian” embellishments (G 39).
Rhetoric is just one dimension of Cicero’s legacy
to French humanists, however. Like many of his
contemporaries, Rabelais alludes frequently to
the Roman orator’s historical, philosophical, and
political writings on topics ranging from military
history to debt and divination. If on one hand
these learned references serve a rhetorical func-
tion, they also enrich the ideological content of
Rabelais’s chronicles with principles of social
justice, reciprocity, and tolerance.
Readings: Richard L. Enos, The Literate Mode of
Cicero’s Legal Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1988); Donald Frame, François Ra-
belais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich, 1977); Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of
the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1993); Neal Wood, Cicero’s
Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
CLOTHES From Panurge’s initial appear-
ance in rags (P 9) to his hooded initiatory smock
(GP 5BK 44; OC 5BK 43) and the Lantern
Queen’s embroidered and bejeweled gown in the
Fifth Book (GP 5BK 33; OC 5BK 32), clothes
permeate the Rabelaisian text. As Lance
Donaldson-Evans points out, “no author of the
early Renaissance in France evinces a greater
interest in clothes than François Rabelais” (2),
who devotes three chapters to Gargantua’s lav-
ish livery and its symbolism (G 8-10), focuses at
length on Panurge’s decorative codpiece, and re-
gales us with myriad details about the luxurious
fabrics (satin, brocade, linen, taffeta, damask,
velvet), rich colors (gold, silver, purple, orange,
green, yellow), ornate accessories (collar pieces
with fine gems, lace veils, hats garnished with
berries and buttons, feathers in the hair, taffeta
petticoats), and fashion-conscious design (form-
fitting stockings and breeches for the men,
topped with luxurious jackets and decorative
weaponery; and for the women short or long
gowns, embroidered with rich silk thread and
studded in pearls) of clothing at Thélème.
In the prologue to Gargantua, of course, Ra-
belais focuses on the frequent discontinuity be-
tween outward appearance and inner worth,
which seems on one level to suggest that “l’habit
ne fait pas le moine,” or, as we say in English,
that one cannot judge a book by its cover. In
Pantagruel this adage may apply to the clergy
and to haughty ladies, who find their impressive
garments torn to shreds or pulled up above their
waists by Panurge’s sly stitchery (P 16). How-
ever, Rabelais more frequently seems to revel in
the symbolic and aesthetic possibilities of cloth-
ing, which serve as indicators of taste, wealth,
power, masculinity, and—hypothetically—inner
nobility of character that is externalized through
the language of clothes. As Count Ludovico da
Canossa points out in Castiglione’s Book of the
Courtier, after all, outward appearances are at
times our only clues to a person’s character. And
while Pantagruel admits that sartorial eccentrici-
ties, such as Panurge’s decision in 3BK 7 to tie
spectacles to his cap, take off his breeches, and
wear a flea-studded earring, are in themselves
neither good nor evil, he nonetheless chastises
his friend gently for flouting “current usage.”
Readings: Lance Donaldson-Evans, “Fashioning
Gargantua: Rabelais and the History of Costume,”
Mots pluriels 10 (1999); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter
Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials
of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000); Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New
Clothes,” ER 14 (1977): 89–104; Florence Weinberg,
“Platonic and Pauline Ideals in Comic Dress: ‘Com-
ment on vestit Gargantua,’ ” Illinois Classical Studies
9 (1984): 183–95.
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

CODPIECE (BRAGUETTE) Taking their or-
igin from plated suits of armor, Renaissance
braguettes or codpieces exaggerated the size of
the male member underneath and were often dec-
orated. Very much in style among the nobility in
the first half of the sixteenth century in France,
the braguette is a very prominent aspect of male
costume in Rabelais, referred to in all four au-
thenticated books and representing aspects of
masculinity such as sexual and military virility.
Implying the noble giant’s future virility, Gar-
gantua’s famous braguette is described in great
comic detail (G 8) not only as enormous, made
up of 24 1⁄4 yards of material, but also as mag-
nificently decorated. The narrator states that
it could be compared “to one of those grand
Horns of Plenty” because of its fertility and full-
ness (see Cornucopia). Inside is a male member
that matches the size of the braguette, “having
no resemblance to the fraudulent braguettes of
so many young gentlemen which contain nothing
but wind.” Since Terence Cave’s influential in-
terpretation, this abundant braguette is generally
taken to represent a textual copia (or abundance),
a rhetorical and humanist commonplace requir-
ing a brand of linguistic versatility and richness
discussed in Erasmus’s well-known De Copia
(1512). In this case, male sexual potency repre-
sented by the braguette corresponds to textual
copia, a link confirmed by the narrator’s refer-
ence near the end of the passage to a book of his
entitled On the Dignity of Braguettes. But even
as the braguette represents a fullness, it is unable
to maintain the quality and in the end is deflated.
The reference to the braguettes “which contain
nothing but wind” implies a sexual as well as a
textual emptiness, as rhetoric can turn out to be
devoid of meaning under its aesthetic exterior.
Although not noble, Panurge is also closely
associated with the braguette in Pantagruel and
the Third Book. As Pantagruel has him dressed
according to the fashion of the day (P 15), Pan-
urge asserts what he sees as his masculinized in-
dividuality by insisting on a braguette “cut three
foot long and square, not round.” Later, as his
academic and rhetorical virility grows and as he
prepares to seduce the object of his affection, he
decorates his braguette “with embroidery in the
Colonna, Francesco 37
Romanesque style” (P 21). As Panurge moves
toward victory in his debate by signs with Thau-
maste (P 19), he draws out, extends, and shakes
his braguette. In this debate, Panurge’s braguette
represents virilized humanism in opposition to
the nonvirile, outdated school of scholasticism
espoused by the feminized Thaumaste (see Per-
sels, 1997).
In the Third Book (3BK 7), Panurge’s quan-
dary as to whether he should marry is symbolized
by what he does with his braguette. Having de-
cided to give up a life of war, he disguises him-
self, removing his “fine and magnificent bra-
guette on which [he] had once relied, as on a
holy anchor.” The following chapter (3BK 8) de-
tails how the braguette is “the principal piece in
a warrior’s armour,” suggesting that Panurge is
contemplating giving up a life of arms in favor
of a more sedate lifestyle based around the fam-
ily (see Russell, 1977). He also describes remov-
ing the braguette as a kind of religious vow
(3BK 24), or a move toward the contemplative
life in which he can make a well-thought-out de-
cision about whether to marry. In the Fourth
Book (5), Dindenault or Dingdong notices that
Panurge is without his braguette and mocks him
as a cuckold, thereby linking being cheated on
by one’s wife with demasculinization. The im-
portance accorded to Panurge’s missing bra-
guette in the Third Book could also refer to an
emptiness of narrative copia in the absurd and
highly repetitious book that leads to no definite
conclusions (see Cave, 1979). Without his tex-
tual/sexual “anchor,” Panurge is devoid of any
kind of textual fertility and of any stable, non-
superficial meaning.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Jeffery C. Persels, “Bra-
gueta Humanı́stica, or Humanism’s Codpiece,” SCJ
28.1 (1997): 79–99; Daniel Russell, “Panurge and his
New Clothes,” ER 14 (1977): 89–104; James Sacré,
“Les métamorphoses d’une braguette,” Littérature 26
(May 1977): 72–93.
Todd Reeser
COLONNA, FRANCESCO (1433–1527)
Fifteenth-century Venetian friar whose allegori-
cal dream vision Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
38 Colors
(Dream of Polyphilus) was published by Aldus
Manutius in 1499. The first vernacular work ever
printed by Aldus, the Hypnerotomachia enjoyed
a great deal of celebrity during the Renaissance
primarily because of its beautiful woodcut illus-
trations. The work was translated into French in
1546 by Jean Martin, under the title Discours du
songe de Poliphile, with original engravings by
Jean Goujon. Rabelais mentions the Hypneroto-
machia twice, both times in relation to hiero-
glyphs, and it has been suggested, plausibly, that
he learned of Colonna’s work from Geoffroy
Tory, whose Champfleury refers to “Polyphile”
as a source of pseudohieroglyphs or imaginary
letters in the manner of the Egyptians. It is cer-
tain that Colonna, Tory, and Rabelais all share
what might be called a typographic aesthetic or
an appreciation of the graphic appeal of words
on the printed page.
Beginning with the eighteenth-century com-
mentator Leduchat, criticism has gradually ac-
knowledged Rabelais’s debt to Colonna. Those
who have studied the presence of Colonna in Ra-
belais usually focus on the episode of the Abbey
of Thélème in Gargantua, the Island of the Ma-
creons in the Fourth Book, and two lengthy bor-
rowings in the Fifth Book: the chess ballet at the
court of Queen Quintessence and the Temple of
Bacbuc, priestess of the Holy Bottle. The as-
sessment of Colonna’s importance for the Fifth
Book has also been used to confirm or deny the
authenticity of the work as well as to distinguish
its various stages of composition.
Most of these episodes exemplify the ekphras-
tic impulse that Rabelais shares with Colonna,
whose lengthy descriptions of art and architec-
ture, of mosaics, obelisks, fountains, and funeral
monuments, occupy the bulk of what is largely
a static, descriptive work. The same tendency
manifests itself at times in Rabelais and begins
to predominate in the conclusion of the Fifth
Book, where the description of the temple of the
Holy Bottle imitates numerous details from Co-
lonna’s temple of Venus Physizoe in which Po-
lifilo and Polia are initiated into the mysteries of
love. The ekphrastic passages found in both au-
thors may even possess some occult significance,
since critics or enthusiasts have discerned al-
chemical symbolism in the architecture and ac-
cessories of the temple which each author de-
scribes. Others suggest that Rabelais himself
initiated the alchemical reading of Colonna by
importing esoteric motifs into forms previously
devoid of any such references (see Alchemy).
One aspect of Rabelais’s reception of Colonna
that deserves much more attention than it has re-
ceived so far is the impact of Colonna’s very
distinctive and unusual diction on Rabelais’s ver-
bal creativity. Colonna inserts Latin words with
Italian declensions into pompous periodic
phrases so as to create an unnatural, hybrid style
of speech. On a much smaller scale, Rabelais ex-
periments with this same procedure in the epi-
sode of the Ecolier Limousin (P 6), who con-
structs his phrases from Latin words with French
endings arranged in vernacular word order. Ra-
belais returns to this hybrid style in his portrayal
of Queen Quintessence (5BK 18–24), whose es-
oteric diction and contorted syntax seem to point
directly to Colonna. Therefore, among the vari-
ous inspirations that Rabelais drew from Co-
lonna’s work, we may include the stylistic ex-
ercise of relatinizing the vernacular to the limit
of its capacity.
Readings: Léon Dorez, “Des origines et de la dif-
fusion du Songe de Poliphile,” Revue des biblio-
thèques 6 (1896): 239–61; Gilles Polizzi, “Thélème ou
l’éloge du don: le texte Rabelaisien à la lumière de
l’Hypernotomachia Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1988): 39–59;
Gilles Polizzi, “Le voyage vers l’oracle ou la dérive
des intertextes dans le Cinquième livre,” Le cin-
quiesme livre. Actes du colloque international de
Rome (Geneva: Droz, 2001): 577–596; Louis Thuasne,
Etudes sur Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1969).
Eric MacPhail
COLORS Together with gestures, emblems,
hieroglyphs, devices, and precious stones, colors
are among the many “signs” endowed with sym-
bolic meaning that feature so prominently in Ra-
belais’s books. A subject that aroused much in-
terest and discussion during the Renaissance,
both in courtly and scholarly circles, colors and
their symbolism are chiefly dealt with in a set of
chapters in Gargantua (8–10). The choice of
white and blue for Gargantua’s livery occasions
a declamation on the true meaning of these col-
ors. Gargantua’s father’s equation of white with
joy and delight, and of blue with heavenly things,
runs counter to the common belief that white sig-

nifies faith and blue firmness. The narrator at-
tributes this view to the anonymous (as he has
it) Blazon of Colors (Blason des couleurs). Be-
hind this apparent target of Alcofrybas’s criti-
cism lie all similar treatises, guilty of arbitrarily
conferring meanings on colors and devices. Un-
like words (3BK 19), colors have natural rather
than imposed meanings. Alcofrybas promises to
devote a long treatise to colors and their real sig-
nificance (G 8). He gives us a sample of it in the
following chapter, an erudite exposition of the
reasons white must be associated with joy and
delight, whose legal, theological, and philosoph-
ical overtones are discussed in a detailed study
by M. A. Screech. These chapters shed light on
color symbolism throughout Rabelais’s work.
Rabelais uses color sparely and with great ef-
fect, usually in descriptions of clothing, liveries,
architecture, food, and wonders. Clusters of color
appear in a relatively small number of episodes,
and their presence is highly symbolic. Rabelais’s
interest in heraldry manifests itself in his precise
descriptions of the colors of noblemen’s liveries
in the Sciomachie (1549), and in the Frozen
Words or parolles gelées episode of the Fourth
Book, where the words take on the guise of he-
raldic colors (4BK 56). Similarly, the brightly
colored feathers of the birds inhabiting Ringing
Island or L’Isle sonante (5BK 5) are emblematic
of different knightly orders. In the utopian Ab-
bey of Thélème, nuns and monks sport fashion-
able outfits in a wealth of colors (G 56), in strik-
ing contrast to their real-life counterparts clad in
grey, dark and dull tones, the colors which stand
for the mendicant friars in the account of the poet
Raminagrobis (3BK 21). Religious symbolism
also dictates the grey and cold colors of King
Lent or Quaresmeprenant’s clothing (4BK 29).
While color is rare in Pantagruel, its use in-
creases markedly in the final books which, as
travel narratives, contain lavish descriptions of
places, curiosities and wonders such as the color-
changing chameleon (4BK 2). The quest for the
Divine Bottle or Dive Bouteille is itself placed
under the auspicious ensigns of white and red
(4BK 1). Color is also present in set expressions,
puns, and curses.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, “Rabelais et son masque
comique: Sophista loquitur,” ER 11 (1974): 113–127;
Community, Portrayal of 39
François Rigolot, “Cratylisme et Pantagruelisme: Ra-
belais et le statut du signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32;
Michael A. Screech, “Emblems and Colours. The Con-
troversy over Gargantua’s Colors and Devices,” Mé-
langes d’histoire du XVIe siècle offerts à Henri Mey-
lan (Geneva: Droz, 1970).
Agnieszka Steczowicz
COMMUNITY, PORTRAYAL OF A strong
unifying theme embodied in the concept of Pan-
tagruelists, the motif of community is found
throughout Rabelais’s writings. Community, the
sharing of common goals and values by a group,
occurs in many forms in the text, reflecting the
numerous communal examples in Rabelais’s own
society from which he could draw inspiration.
The monastery was likely an influential standard
of community for Rabelais. As is seen in his four
chronicles, Rabelais could be critical of monas-
teries, characterizing monks as timorous gluttons
seeking refuge from worldly hazards and respon-
sibilities rather than isolation for devout prayer
and meditation. Like many humanists, Rabelais
believed that the Apostles and other early Chris-
tians constituted the ideal community, with the
monastical system having distanced itself over
time from their model. It is apparent that Rabe-
lais was not entirely comfortable with his own
role as a monk: first a Franciscan, then a Bene-
dictine, he and the other members of his Bene-
dictine abbey at Saint-Maur-les-Fossés eventu-
ally became secularized. Rabelais’s utopian
Abbey of Thélème, described at the end of Gar-
gantua, offers, perhaps, a counterpoint to the tra-
ditional monastery. Founded by Gargantua and
led by the vigorous Frère Jean, it is a commu-
nity restricted to the young, beautiful, and noble.
Another highly organized community of which
Rabelais was critical was the Sorbonne. As an
adjunct of the Church, the institution of theolo-
gians invoked its royally sanctioned powers to
censor humanist books and to exile their authors.
Rabelais saw his own works criticized and cen-
sored as well as those of Francis I’s sister, Mar-
guerite de Navarre (see Censors and Censor-
ship). Even more damaging was the Sorbonne’s
influence in spearheading campaigns of perse-
cution and oppression, often leading to the autos-
da-fés of prominent scholars. Humanists such as
Rabelais not only found the Sorbonne’s actions
40 Coq-à-l’âne
reprehensible but deemed its very practice of
learning and language to be retrograde and per-
nicious. In Gargantua, Rabelais ridicules at
length the pompous manner and corrupt Latin of
the ubiquitous Sorbonnicoles with his presenta-
tion of Gargantua’s bumbling and ineffective tu-
tor, Thubal Holoferne.
Humanists in general offered Rabelais a rich
and positive communal example. The noun hu-
manista itself, used in late fifteenth-century Italy
to designate members of a professional group of
teachers, is based on the notion of a community
of scholars. The humanist attitude deemed learn-
ing and the practice of virtue as distinctive to
man. The late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-
century humanists Desiderius Erasmus, Tho-
mas More, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, and
Guillaume Budé concentrated their intellectual
efforts on the study of classical works which em-
phasized the dignity of man. Not only did these
scholars’ writings exert a great influence on Ra-
belais’s intellectual development, but their close
friendships and regular correspondence gave
Rabelais a standard for communal excellence.
Small but influential groups in Rabelais’s so-
ciety are represented throughout the Third Book
as Panurge visits those whom he believes can
best predict whether he should marry. Rabelais
satirizes communities of lawyers, judges, doc-
tors, charlatans, and seers as their representatives
such as Raminagrobis, Bridoye, Triboullet,
and Rondibilis offer their opinions to Panurge.
The portrayal of community is most promi-
nently demonstrated in the Fourth Book. The
text’s narrative consists of successive encounters
of various communal island groups by Panta-
gruel’s own community on his ship, the Thala-
mège. The chronicle provides the modern reader
with a view of the microcosm of cultural issues
and conflicts predominant in mid-sixteenth-
century France. For instance, the widespread de-
velopment and increasing importance of inter-
national commerce is emphasized on the trade
island of Medamothi (4BK 2), as well as on
Dindenault’s merchant ship (6). The period’s
rapid technical advances are reflected in Gaster’s
litany of inventions (57). Not least, the religious
strife between Protestant groups and Catholics
occurring at the time of the book’s composition
is highlighted with the inclusion of Quaresme-
prenant (Lentkeeper) (29), the Andouilles (Chit-
terlings) (35), the Papefigues (45), and the Pap-
imanes (48) episodes.
Rabelais’s reading and his knowledge of di-
verse literary communities would have further
helped him in imagining the insular communities
eventually depicted in the Fourth Book. Well
versed in classical literature, Rabelais would
have been familiar with utopian communities
such as Atlantis in Plato’s Timaeus. Lucian’s
tongue-in-cheek presentation of fantastic imagi-
nary communities in his True History, along with
Plutarch’s tales in The Moralia, inspired Rabe-
lais’s own chronicles. The myth of Paradise or
the Golden Age permeate Rabelais’s readings. It
appears in classical works such as Hesiod’s
Works and Days with its most familiar version,
the Garden of Eden, introduced in the biblical
book of Genesis. Closer to Rabelais’s own time,
Thomas More’s Utopia and Sebastian Brant’s
Ship of Fools’ depictions of imaginary commu-
nities were known to Rabelais. With this variety
of sources in mind, Rabelais in his Fourth Book
established Pantagruel’s ship as a paradigmatic
community to which all others may be compared,
as it accommodates both wisdom and nonsense.
The resultant comparisons sometimes become sa-
tirical and even caricatural, a trait shared by all
of Rabelais’s works.
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais,
Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
1998): 68–101; Margaret Harp, The Portrayal of Com-
munity in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (New York: Peter
Lang, 1997).
Margaret Harp
COQ-À-L’ÂNE Originally a form of poetry
that commented critically on current events be-
hind the protective veil of an allusive style that
jumped from topic to topic without any apparent
coherence—hence the alternative designation of
non sequitur. Thomas Sebillet defines the coq-à-
l’âne as a truly French form of the satire, in-
vented by Clément Marot, in his Art poëtique
françoys (1548), an assessment that Joachim du
Bellay confirms in his Deffense et Illustration de
la langue françoyse (1549). Marot’s first Epı̂tre
du coq à l’âne dates from 1530, shortly before
the publication of Pantagruel. We find similar
incoherent structures in medieval farce and

sottie-plays as well as in the lesser known genres
of the fatras and the fatrasie, the fatrasie provid-
ing a prose model for the non sequitur. Techni-
cally, the coq-à-l’âne therefore falls in the cate-
gory that Nothrop Frye calls “low-norm satire”
(Anatomy of Criticism). In Rabelais the form is
particularly prominent in the first two books, the
process of Baisecul and Humevesne (P 10–13)
or the “Fanfreluches antidotées” (G 2) consti-
tuting its most obvious examples. It virtually
vanishes in the later books, being replaced by
more erudite and classical forms of satire. This
change could serve as an indicator of Rabelais’s
development as a writer, who, in his early phase,
was feeding off of medieval literary traditions,
while at the same time attempting, through satire,
to move beyond them.
Readings: Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:
Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957); Claude-Albert Mayer, “Coq-à-l’âne: Défini-
tion—Invention—Attribution,” FS 16 (1962): 1–13;
Bernd Renner, “Du coq-à-l’âne à la ménippéenne: la
satire comme forme d’expression littéraire chez Ra-
belais” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Fran-
çois Rigolot, “Dichotomie linguistique. Le mot et la
syntaxe,” Les langages de Rabelais, ER 10 (Geneva:
Droz, 1972): 41–48; Thomas Sebillet, Art poetique
françois, ed. Felix Gaffe and Francis Goyet, Societé
des textes francais modernes 6 (Paris: Nizet, 1988).
Bernd Renner
CORNUCOPIA Cornucopian imagery in Ra-
belais frequently functions as a vehicle for self-
conscious reflection on the workings of language
and the potential disjunction between rhetorical
surface and the thing represented. This theme is
particularly prominent in Gargantua 8, the de-
scription of the child Gargantua’s codpiece,
where Alcofrybas uses the simile of a horn of
plenty in asserting that the bejeweled exterior ac-
curately represents the value of the contents. The
passage ends with a negative counterexample of
codpieces “full only of wind,” however, and par-
allel passages in Pantagruel (8) and the Third
Book (7) likewise evoke the threat of mere rep-
etition or emptiness in what initially appears to
be potency. A similar anxiety is visible in the
prologue to the Third Book, where references to
the book as “an inexhaustible barrel . . . a real
Cornucopia” are systematically undercut by im-
Correspondence 41
ages of unattainability and lack. The motif of
empty proliferation plays out on a structural level
as well. The repetitiveness of Panurge’s consul-
tations makes the Third Book appear as a dram-
atization of the impossibility of moving beyond
ambiguous signs to interpretive certitude, and the
quest theme of the Fourth Book can be read as
a spatial enactment of the search for a locus of
abundance.
Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text exam-
ines the notion of copia as a rhetorical ideal
whereby northern Renaissance writers sought to
imitate the stylistic plenitude and inexhaustible
meanings of the great pagan texts and Scripture.
A prominent theme in the works of Erasmus,
especially De duplici copia verborum ac rerum
(1512), copia also figures in Rabelais, Ronsard,
Montaigne, and other canonical Renaissance
writers. Cave highlights the tension between the
humanist preference for protean texts (which
yield potentially limitless interpretations rather
than being reducible to a single stable reading)
and the persistent fear that displays of rhetorical
virtuosity might mask the absence of an altior
sensus or higher meaning.
Reading: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
Jennifer Monahan
CORRESPONDENCE Very little of Rabe-
lais’s correspondence survives, and such as does
exist is rather due to the distinction of the re-
ceiver than to that of the sender. The young
monk at Fontenay-le-Comte sought to make con-
tact with major humanist scholars, as witness his
earliest surviving letter of March 4, 1521 (BnF,
ms. Rothschild, arm. 1510), the surviving frag-
ment of his correspondence with Guillaume
Budé, which earned him two replies from Budé,
of which one was in Greek. Rabelais tries to im-
press by imitating Budé’s style and ideas, in-
cluding the mixture of Greek and Latin, images
of darkness and madness, and elaborate legal
jokes. Another surviving autograph humanist let-
ter was sent ten years later to Erasmus on No-
vember 30, 1532 (formerly in Leipzig, ms.
0331m, now lost). The humanist script is similar,
as is the profession of devotion, but the style is
now more elegant and less showy. Fragments of
poems suggest he was also in correspondence
42 Correspondence
with Tiraqueau and others, but the next firm ev-
idence of his public humanist letters consists in
the dedicatory epistles which he included in
1532–34 with his first scholarly publications in
Lyon: to André Tiraqueau (June 3, 1532); to
Geoffroy d’Estissac (July 15, 1532); to Amaury
Bouchard (September 4, 1532) and to Jean du
Bellay (August 31, 1534). In these letters he con-
tinues the art of panegyric and remains faithful
to the hellenizing Latin of Budé, full of unusual
vocabulary, of numerous quotations from or al-
lusions to classical texts, and of striking images.
The letter to Tiraqueau is a good example of his
kaleidoscopic use of metaphors; the opening of
the letter to du Bellay exemplifies Rabelais’s
Latin rhetoric, with carefully constructed trico-
lon, parallelism, wordplay, and climax. Gone is
the humility of the letters to Budé and Erasmus,
replaced by the confident advocacy by a pub-
lished author of the new humanist philology and
fierce denunciation of its opponents.
A verse epistle to Jean Bouchet dated Septem-
ber 6, [1527?], and its reply, suggest that Rabe-
lais participated in the exchange of letters in
verse common under Francis I. Rabelais’s sur-
viving neo-Latin poetry suggests that he partook
in similar, often joking, exchanges in Latin with
poets like Etienne Dolet, Salmon Macrin, and
Jean de Boyssonné. A few fragments exist of his
personal correspondence in French with friends
and protectors. The three letters sent from Rome
to d’Estissac in 1535–36 are part of a larger lost
correspondence with his spiritual superior (at
least ten lost letters). One of them (January 28,
1536, BnF, ms. Rothschild A.xvi.162) is auto-
graph and shows Rabelais writing in a French
bastard hand, except for foreign quotations which
are in italic. These letters send political news
from Rome and the Mediterranean, drawn in part
from printed newsletters, which do not show him
to be particularly well informed. He reveals his
patriotism in the judgments he offers on the
news, and his style at times reflects that of his
comic works, with lists, Italianate vocabulary,
and picturesque images. Other indiscreet letters
he wrote were intercepted and provoked the fa-
mous quart d’heure de Rabelais, or short brush
with the law, during which he was reportedly ar-
rested and interrogated by Cardinal François de
Tournon. During his stay in Turin (1540–42) he
also exchanged letters with the ambassador in
Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, of which three re-
plies survive: apart from snippets of news, the
topics were law, medicine and the copying of
ancient manuscripts. During one vacation from
Turin Rabelais wrote to a friend in Orléans, An-
toine Hullot (March 1, [1542]), which survives
only in copies: Rabelais’s letter inviting his
friend to a Lenten banquet, at which lists of wine
and fish would be served, is reminiscent of his
comic writing, with its dense, allusive burlesque
patter. No greater contrast could be imagined
than with Rabelais’s only other surviving auto-
graph letter, sent from Metz on February 6,
[1547?] to Jean du Bellay (formerly in the Barrett
collection in Chicago): reduced to exile, indi-
gence, and despair, he pleads with his wealthy
patron for support, apparently with success, since
within a few months he was with the cardinal in
Rome.
Rabelais’s books contain models of epistolary
writing that reveal the author’s interest in rhet-
oric (P 8; G 29; 4BK 3–4), as well as an admi-
rable example of Rabelais’s own formal letter-
writing in the epı̂tre to Odet de Chastillon
(January 28, 1552), thanking him for his support
and stoutly defending himself, presented in a
long image of the doctor, against his calumni-
ateurs or detractors. As was common with con-
temporary newsletters, Rabelais’s occasional
piece, La Sciomachie of 1549, is presented as
“excerpted from a copy of the letters” (“extraict
d’une copie des lettres”) sent from Rome to the
cardinal de Guise, and contains a number of epis-
tolary devices. The style chosen exemplifies the
elegant vernacular that Rabelais was pioneering,
but without the comic elements and the overlay
of erudition present in his five books.
Readings: Jacques Boulenger, “Etude critique sur
les lettres écrites d’Italie par François Rabelais,” RER
1 (1903): 97–121; Victor-Louis Bourrilly, ed., Rabe-
lais, lettres écrites d’Italie, (Paris: Champion, 1910);
Henri Clouzot, “Les amitiés de Rabelais en orléanais
et la lettre au bailli du bailli des baillis,” RER 3 (1905):
156–75; Richard A. Cooper, “Rabelais’ neo-Latin
writings,” Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renais-
sance France, ed. Grahame Castor and Terence Cave
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); R. A. Coo-
per, Rabelais et l’Italie (Geneva: Droz, 1991); R. A.
Cooper, “Rabelais ‘architriclin dudict Pantagruel,’ ”

Rabelais-Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse, ed. Michel
Bideaux (Montpellier: J. Laffitte, 1997); Arthur Heul-
hard, Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, son exil à Metz
(Paris: 1891); Librairie de l’art, Fritz Neubert, “Fran-
çois Rabelais’ Briefe,” Zeitschrift für französische
Sprache und Literatur 71 (1961): 154–85.
Richard Cooper
COUILLATRIS (4BK prol.) Poor woodcutter
from the village of Gravot (Bourgueil) whose
name literally translates as the “ballsy guy,”
Couillatris appears in the prologue to the Fourth
Book as the central character and model of mod-
eration and sexual temperance in Rabelais’s fan-
tastic version of an Old Testament miracle story
(2 Kings 6.1–7). Though the biblical story in-
volves divine intervention in the retrieval of a
lost axe blade, Rabelais centers his interpretation
of its significance around a claim that the biblical
miracle took place only because the prayer re-
quest for restoring the axe blade; that is, the
woodcutter’s source of livelihood, was reasona-
ble and moderate. From this claim Rabelais de-
velops a parable whose message is expanded to
encourage moderation and temperance specifi-
cally with regard to sexual conduct, insofar as
such moderation would permit maintenance of
man’s prize possession: good health.
Replete with sexual metaphors beyond his
name, the Couillatris story relates that after los-
ing his axe blade the woodsman is soon visited
by Death, upon which he vigorously summons
Jupiter to intervene and either return or replace
his only source of livelihood. The axe blade here
becomes a metaphor for health, following the pri-
mary theme of the prologue. As Jupiter considers
the request, enters Priapus, a god of fertility and
viticulture typically represented with a large vir-
ile member, to link the condition of prolonged
and painful erections to the increasingly explicit
theme of (im)moderation in sexual activity. The
lustful god reports on various definitions of the
term used here to designate an axe blade (coig-
née), citing popular poetry and song to authen-
ticate the word’s multiple sexual connotations.
Rabelais pushes his health metaphor further by
clarifying that the loss of Couillatris’s “blade” is
akin to the loss of sexual health, most likely due
to syphilis, and thus related to diminishing health
in general. Mercury, here messenger for the gods,
Critical Theory 43
but for Doctor Rabelais the main ingredient of
deadly charlatan treatments for syphilis, is sent
to offer a choice of three axe blades: Couillatris’s
blade along with one of gold and another of sil-
ver. Should the woodsman choose a blade other
than his, he is to be executed with his own axe.
However, if he chooses his own in an act of wise
moderation and honesty, he is to be rewarded
with the two others. Fortunately, the simple
Couillatris opts for his own blade.
Reveling in his newfound fortune, the wood-
cutter goes on to acquire land and animals in
such quantity that he is soon the wealthiest man
around. When others learn of the manner in
which he obtained his fortune, they attempt to
repeat the scene. Not having learned, however,
that the key to riches is moderation (i.e., refusal
of the gold and silver axe heads), the eager
fortune-seekers try to claim the precious blades
and are instantly executed by terrible Mercury
with their own blades. The Couillatris “parable”
succeeds in showing the potentially deadly re-
sults of excess desire and immoderate behavior,
while praising themes dear to Doctor Rabelais:
moderation, abstinence, and valuing one’s health
above all else, even at the expense of sexual
pleasure.
Reading: Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:
Duckworth, 1979).
Lesa Randall
CRITICAL THEORY Although the most
dramatic impact of critical theory on Rabelais
studies coincides with the appearance of struc-
turalism and poststructuralism on the intellectual
scene in the 1960s and beyond, in a sense the
critical attitude of professional readers of Rabe-
lais has always been grounded in the literary the-
ories of the day. The hostility manifested toward
Rabelais’s work in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries has sometimes been explained in
political terms, as an effect of the progressive
embourgeoisement of French society. But it can
also be ascribed, with at least equal justification,
to the dominance of classical norms at the time
of Boileau and La Bruyère, and to their persist-
ence in neoclassical guise in the age of Voltaire.
Conversely, the enthusiasm of the Romantic gen-
eration had obviously much to do with their con-
viction that a hallmark of great literary works
44 Critical Theory
was their ability to present a complete picture of
reality, encompassing in a bold juxtaposition—
as Rabelais’s book so strikingly did—both the
sublime and the grotesque elements of human ex-
perience. The correlation between critical ap-
proach and dominant theory is even clearer at the
turn of the century, when the prevailing positiv-
istic mentality and more specifically the deter-
ministic literary theories of Hippolyte Taine,
with their stress on social milieu and historic mo-
ment, led Abel Lefranc and his academic follow-
ers to appreciate Rabelais’s fiction above all for
its alleged realism and its documentary value.
Modern critical theories begin to affect the
course of Rabelais criticism some sixty years
later, with Leo Spitzer’s ahistorical approach to
textual analysis. When the German philologist,
in a memorably scathing article entitled “Rabe-
lais et les ‘rabelaisants’ ” (1960), seeks to impose
his conception of Rabelais’s work as an original
verbal creation rather than a mere recreation of
preexisting metalinguistic reality, he does so in
the name of a theory which, in its insistence on
aesthetic appreciation of form and structure in-
dependent of any contextual considerations, sit-
uates itself at the crossroads of Russian Formal-
ism, New Criticism, and the peculiarly French
tradition of the explication de texte.
To the extent that Spitzer’s attack was aimed
specifically at the kind of interpretative studies
that persisted in the wake of Abel Lefranc into
the 1950s, it also represented one of the first at-
tempts to challenge the traditional interpretation
of Rabelais’s fictional work as a document pro-
moting the religious and cultural values of Ren-
aissance humanism. Another more specifically
ideological challenge to traditional humanistic
interpretations came at more or less the same
time from the Marxist wing of Rabelais critics,
first in 1955 with a study by Henri Lefebvre,
then, some thirteen years later, with Mikhail
Bakhtin’s monumental Rabelais and His World.
Le problème de l’incoyance au XVIe siècle, Lu-
cien Febvre’s historical, psychological, and so-
ciological study of what Lucien Goldmann was
to call the “mental structures” at the time of Ra-
belais, had previously sought to replace the con-
cept of rationalistic humanism, which Rabelais’s
work was alleged to embody, by a new concept
of the Renaissance as an age of sensibility and
instinct rather than science and knowledge. This
time it is humanism itself, however defined,
which finds itself rejected as the dominant ide-
ology underlying Rabelais’s fictional text. Mini-
mizing in the extreme the role of official high
culture as its source of inspiration, the Marxist
readings present Rabelais’s work as reflecting ei-
ther the totality of human experience at a partic-
ular moment in the inexorable progress of history
toward a better world, or, in the case of Bakhtin,
its popular origins and the carnivalesque spirit
of subversion allegedly permeating every aspect
of the Gargantua-Pantagruel. Bakhtin’s dog-
matic contention that Rabelais can only be un-
derstood in the context of popular culture and
folk humor, his emphasis on Rabelais’s use of
the language of the marketplace, and his valori-
zation of the lower body (at the expense of the
mind) as the productive center of transformation
and renewal, have been seen by some as political
propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Others
have viewed it as a welcome antidote to the hith-
erto excessive stress on the intellectual content
of Rabelais’s fiction. But all would no doubt ac-
knowledge that in its new semiotic orientation,
and in its emphasis on the text as a polyphony
of alternative voices free from any authorial in-
terference, Rabelais and His World played a de-
termining role in ushering in the momentous
changes that were to characterize the structuralist
and poststructuralist phase of Rabelais criticism
in the next decades of its evolution.
Rabelais’s awareness of the problems inherent
in the use of language, and the often ambiguous,
paradoxical, and sometimes ambivalent nature of
his text had been noted by traditional scholars
and critics well before the advent of linguistic
structuralism. Recently, critics of poststructural
persuasion such as Jean Paris and, more recently
still, Michel Jeanneret, have sought to draw from
these early insights their fullest consequences.
They have also sought to prove, through a new
reading of such texts as the prologue to Gargan-
tua and the episode of the Frozen Words in
Book 4, that Rabelais had anticipated the theories
of structural linguistics about the essential am-
biguity and polyvalence of all verbal statements;
that his ambiguous, paradoxical, discontinuous
text was a direct result of his discovery of the
contingency of language; and that the prologue,

far from sanctioning the search for a specific
meaning embedded in the fictional fabric of the
book, proposes a new conception of the act of
reading, in which the reader is responsible for
the interpretation he chooses to impose upon a
text whose intended meaning will never be
known.
Behind such pronouncements, it is not difficult
to detect some of the main tenets of structuralist
and poststructuralist theories as they relate to lit-
erary texts: Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the
arbitrariness of verbal signs and their frequent
inability to signify; Roland Barthes’s proclama-
tion of the Death of the Author, and his conten-
tion that a text is not to be read as the expression
of a writer’s thought but as a rearrangement of
what had already been written into a new config-
uration offered for the pleasure of the reader;
Michel Foucault’s reflection on the relationship
between words and things; Lacan’s rejection of
the idea that a text can reveal the author’s in-
tended meaning, in view of the role of the un-
conscious in literary expression; and Derrida’s
similar contention, grounded in his deconstruc-
tionism, that authors always say something dif-
ferent from what they mean to say, because the
unfolding of their text owes more to the laws of
textuality than to authorial intention.
In an early structuralist “Note sur Rabelais et
le langage” published in Tel Quel in 1963, Jean
Starobinski pointed out how often an absurd ep-
isode in Rabelais’s novels is “rectified” in the
one that follows, and saw in this alternation the
main principle of their secret structure. Noting
the same alternation between opposing view-
points within any given episode, but rejecting the
notion of “rectification” as implying an unwar-
ranted belief in authorial intervention, later Rab-
elaisian structuralists postulated such binary op-
positions as forming the very essence of
Rabelais’s dialectical text. They then endowed it
with a plurality of alternative meanings whose
function was to enrich its thematic complexity
while invalidating by their coexistence any at-
tempt at coherent interpretation. The extremism
of this position, and the contention that it was
authorized by Rabelais’s own reflection on lan-
guage and interpretation, were bound to engen-
der, as indeed they did in the 1980s, one of the
Critical Theory 45
most heated controversies in the turbulent history
of Rabelais criticism. Viewing poststructuralist
criticism of Rabelais as fundamentally wrong-
headed in its adoption of an antihumanistic ap-
proach to an essentially humanistic work, rela-
tively traditionalist scholars like Gérard Defaux,
François Rigolot, and Edwin Duval saw the mod-
ern critics’ insistence upon the polyvalence of
Rabelais’s text as stemming from their adherence
to the fashionable tenets of poststructuralist the-
ory rather than from a careful reading of Rabe-
lais’s text. The modern critics’ equally spirited
defense of their position can be followed in the
scholarly publications of the time. Only recently
has the polemic lost some of its vehemence, as
poststructuralism itself casts an increasingly
amused and skeptical glance at its earlier preten-
sions.
Whatever controversy still surrounds Rabelais
studies can be found above all in the application
of feminist theories to Rabelais criticism. On the
question of Rabelais’s attitude toward women,
traditional criticism has been particularly inde-
cisive. For those who believe that Rabelais did
not mean to withdraw from the debate but chose
to express himself through his fictional charac-
ters, it has been relatively easy to point to any
number of episodes and statements in which
women are treated either contemptuously or with
respect, and to conclude accordingly, with un-
warranted assurance, that Rabelais was either a
misogynist, a feminist, neither, or both. The most
recent attempt to find a way out of the resulting
impasse has been to reconsider the problem in
the light of modern feminism. Although fifteen
years have passed since Wayne Booth hailed its
emergence as the most transformative develop-
ment in Rabelais studies, feminist criticism does
not seem to have left entirely behind its initial
polemical phase, and periodically threatens to
lose sight of Rabelais—in favor of itself—as its
legitimate object. Nonetheless, it has already pro-
posed some intriguingly new interpretations,
such as Elizabeth Chesney Zegura’s attempt to
reconcile Rabelais’s frequently unflattering por-
trayal of women with their egalitarian treatment
at the Abbey of Thélème. She proposes an an-
aphrastic reading of the seemingly misogynous
texts and suggests that they may have been in-
46 Cuckoldry, Fear of
tended as an indirect, inverted satire of men’s
phallocentric antifeminism (and more generally
of our intolerance of the Other) rather than the
merciless indictment of women they are com-
monly taken to be. Other scholars have enlarged
the scope of the investigation by subjecting to
a feminist reading a number of aspects not pri-
marily related to women. (Françoise Charpen-
tier’s psychoanalytic approach in her study of
the near-exclusion of women from the anthro-
pological structure of the giants’ kingdoms, and
Carla Freccero’s similarly oriented study of the
theme of paternity in her Father Figures: Ge-
nealogy and Narrative Structure [1991] come
to mind.) Now that the controversies surrounding
poststructural approaches have somewhat died
down, it is this feminist criticism, with its inher-
ently interdisciplinary bent, that promises to
provide the most innovative perspective on the
complexities of Rabelais’s text in the years to
come.
Readings: Richard Berrong, “Finding Antifeminism
in Rabelais; or, A Response to Wayne Booth’s Call
for an Ethical Criticism,” CI 11.4 (1985): 687–96; Ter-
ence Cave, Michel Jeanneret, and François Rigolot,
“Sur la prétendue transparence de Rabelais,” RHLF
(July–August 1986): 709–16; Gérard Defaux, “D’un
problème l’autre:Herméneutique de l’ ‘altior sensus’
et ‘captatio lectoris’ dans le prologue de Gargantua,”
RHLF (March–April 1985): 195–216; Edwin M. Du-
val, “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of
Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua,” ER 18 (1985): 1–
17; Michel Jeanneret, “Signs Gone Wild: The Dis-
mantling of Allegory,” François Rabelais: Critical As-
sessments, ed. Jean-Claude Carron (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995); Elizabeth Chesney
Zegura, “Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais,”
JMRS 15.1 (1985): 125–34.
Bruno Braunrot
CUCKOLDRY, FEAR OF Along with the
question of marriage, fear of cuckoldry forms
the main framework of the Third Book, as Pan-
urge is unable to decide whether or not he should
marry, and if he does, whether he will be cuck-
olded, beaten, and robbed by his wife. His fear,
combined with his acute narcissism, keeps him
in a perpetual state of indecision, and after a long
series of consultations with soothsayers, a nec-
romancer, a poet, a philosopher, a doctor, a the-
ologian, and a couple of fools, Panurge remains
in the same state in which he began. Fear of
cuckoldry is a familiar theme in misogynistic lit-
erature, from the Romance of the Rose (Roman
de la rose [1225–78]) to The Fifteen Joys of
Marriage (Les XV joies de marriage [early fif-
teenth century]), from fabliaux to farce, where
antifeminist sentiment is brought to the fore
through traditional sexist beliefs that in marriage,
a man ran a threefold risk: the likelihood of cuck-
oldry, the dangers of being browbeaten, and the
impossibility of satisfying the insatiable lust of
his wife. Such sentiments contributed to what be-
came known as La querelle des femmes, and it
has been suggested that Panurge’s concerns in
the Third Book represent Rabelais’s contribution
to this ongoing debate on the nature of women.
Readings: Catharine Randall, “Le cocuage hypoth-
étique de Panurge: Le monde à l’envers dans Le tiers
livre,” Constructions (1986): 77–86; M. A. Screech,
The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Edward Arnold,
1958).
E. Bruce Hayes
 D
DEATH, TREATMENT OF Rabelais’s treat-
ment of death unites a range of influences both
classical and contemporary, scientific and artistic.
Also informing his approach is the traditional
Christian association of death with sin and folly.
Although it is not possible to present an exhaus-
tive list of allusions to death in these chronicles,
we can easily isolate four episodes to illustrate
the major points of Rabelais’s treatment of this
subject.
The death of Badebec at the birth of Panta-
gruel (P 2–3) immediately presents the reader
with many of the themes to be associated with
death throughout the mock epic. On a very literal
level, we see the medical reality of the hazards
of childbirth in sixteenth-century France. The di-
lemma faced by Gargantua, torn between joy at
the birth of his son and grief at the loss of his
wife, highlights two others. The debate the newly
widowed father holds with himself echoes other
Renaissance works (Marguerite de Navarre’s
“Dialogue in the Form of a Nocturnal Vision”
[“Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,” c.
1520]) for example) that present the Christian
survivor wrestling with the desire to grieve at the
loss of a loved one and the recognition that the
dead in Paradise are better off than they were on
earth. This view of death is parodied by Panurge
in his sermon to the drowning shepherds in the
Dindenault episode of the Fourth Book (4BK
8). Pantagruel’s birth at the cost of his mother’s
death also introduces the view of the life cycle
as an economy: life in exchange for death in
exchange for life. This view of death is strongly
influenced by the Christian message of salvation
that the death of Christ bought eternal life for
humankind. The economic exchange of life for
death is also reflected in the letter from Gargan-
tua (P 8), where the ability to produce children
is presented as part of a cycle of générations et
corruptions that will end only with the Last
Judgment.
The physical aspects of death are explored in
Rabelais’s scenes of battle, and we can consider
Gymnaste’s combat against Tripet (G 35) as an
example. Doctor Rabelais describes the mutilated
human body using vocabulary that evokes a phy-
sician at an autopsy. These graphic descriptions
echo the artwork of the period, especially por-
trayals of the danse macabre, the “triumph of
death,” and Last Judgment illustrations of the
punishment of the damned. Rabelais seems to
share this fascination with morbid imagery while
simultaneously revealing a scientific interest in
death and dying. With precise description of
limbs severed and organs destroyed by the pass-
ing weapon, the text attempts to pinpoint the
physical location of death, the precise moment
when the mortal body can no longer serve as a
viable host for the immortal soul.
The influence of classical thought on death is
best seen in the death of Raminagrobis (3BK
21–23) and on the Island of the Macreons. The
dying poet shows the detachment from this world
of those clearly aware they are about to leave it
and presents the art of dying well. The conflict
between humanists and the proponents of tradi-
tional piety is highlighted by Raminagrobis’s
characterization of the clergy as vultures swarm-
ing around the dying and Panurge’s shocked re-
action to this characterization. The Island of the
Macreons (4BK 25–28), populated by elderly hu-
mans and dying heroes and demons with ruined
monuments filling its center, illustrates the mor-
tality of all created things. In a carefully crafted
conversation between Pantagruel and the Ma-
crobe, Rabelais’s treatment of death and dying
unifies classical thought and Christian orthodoxy.
Ancient beliefs regarding natural phenomena sig-
naling the departure of great souls is supported
48 Debts or Debtors, Praise of
by the testimony of those who witnessed the
death of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543. The sug-
gestion that some souls come to a finite end, a
view posited by Plutarch’s De defectu oraculo-
rum, is corrected by Pantagruel’s assertion of
Christian teaching regarding the soul’s immor-
tality. His reinterpretation of the tale of the death
of Pan as a revelation of the death of Christ
crowns this Christianization of classical thought
and inquiry. The episode on the island of the Ma-
creons is the most direct treatment of the subject
of death in the four books. Because of its central
placement within the Fourth Book some critics
interpret the entire book as a voyage in the realm
of the dead.
Readings: Claude Blum, La représentation de la
mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance,
2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1989); Douglas L.
Boudreau-Tiegezh, “Death in the Quart Livre,” RN
37.2 (Winter 1997): 183–91.
Douglas L. Boudreau
DEBTS OR DEBTORS, PRAISE OF (3BK 2–
5) Panurge’s Praise of Debts is the focus of
chapters 2–5 of Rabelais’s Third Book. Rabelais
takes Erasmus for a source in his Praise of
Debts, which like the Praise of Folly is mock
serious. M. A. Screech sees the passage as Pan-
urge’s misapplication of Ficino’s Commentary
on Plato’s Symposium in which love is said to
hold the world together (Screech 1970: 225–26).
In his self-justification, Panurge appears as a
comic rhetorician presenting debt as the moving
force of the universe. By declaring those who
disagree with him to be heretics, Panurge’s spe-
cious arguments in favor of outlandish spending
pointedly recall the rhetoric of the priests of the
Sorbonne and appear to convey Rabelais’s crit-
icism of Church practices (Screech 227).
In chapter 2 of the Third Book, Pantagruel
gives the wardenship of Salmagundia or Sal-
migondin to Panurge after the war with the Dip-
sodians. Jean Paris (1970) surmises that, since
Pantagruel had earlier given the manor to Alco-
frybas Nasier, anagram for François Rabelais, in
chapter 32 of Pantagruel, Rabelais seems to be
indicating to the reader that in some ways Pan-
urge is to be his mouthpiece in this section (177–
78). Paradoxically, we learn that Panurge had
mismanaged the property and exhausted the rev-
enues from the property for the next three years.
Rather than spending funds on the erection of
buildings, Panurge had wasted his resources on
feasts for his good companions and performed
proverbially condemned financial practices such
as buying dear, selling cheap, and eating his
wheat in the blade (3BK 2). Using Marx’s terms,
Paris explains that Panurge considers his assets
for their use value and intends to consume them,
while Pantagruel’s more bourgeois advice is to
conserve the resources and property in order to
retain their future exchange value and accumu-
late worth (183–84).
As is typical of a mock encomium, Panurge
uses and misuses arguments from various sources
in his defense, acting in a way that is contradic-
tory to the maxims of the oracle of Delphi and
yet claiming he is following the four cardinal vir-
tues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temper-
ance and the three theological virtues of faith,
hope, and charity (Screech 1979: 226–28). Still,
Pantagruel condemns Panurge for not following
Roman sumptuary laws, which forbade the
spending of more than one’s annual income in
one year and accuses him of having sacrificed all
of his goods as in a Roman feast (3BK 2). In
response, Panurge heretically presents himself as
a Creator and praises himself for his creation of
debts out of nothing, which is metaphysically im-
possible according to philosophers (3BK 3). Sig-
nificantly, in this regard, Rabelais and Panurge
are similar, with each effecting a creation ex nih-
ilo.
By definition, Panurge’s spending beyond his
means implies the possibility of credit. This pro-
ductive use of signs had been condemned in the
previous (medieval) era. Scholastic economists,
following Aristotle, had believed that the gen-
eration of interest through credit (the fruition of
money) was immoral or unnatural since money
was thought to be fungible or sterile (Lavatori
1996: 66). Nevertheless, letters of credit were a
reality in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for
funding merchant voyages and the French mon-
archy used ultimately worthless banknotes to fi-
nance wars. This borrowing, combined with the
influx of precious metals from the Americas, pro-
duced an inflationary economy that wreaked
havoc on the finances of ordinary citizens. In
placing the praise of debt in the mouth of the

apparent fool, Panurge, Rabelais appears to be
obliquely critiquing royal and Church policies
and at least bringing some humor to a phenom-
enon that most likely troubled his readers (Ze-
gura and Tetel 1993: 94–95). However, follow-
ing Aristotle’s comparison of the composition of
the state with the parts of the human body in
Politics V, Panurge naturalizes debt and com-
pares the exchange of money within the state
with the circulation of blood within the body.
In his vision of a world without debts, Panurge
uses the concept of the macrocosm and micro-
cosm which was so important to the Renaissance
mind, affirming that without debts the cosmos
would devolve into chaos and the organs of the
human body would refuse to interact because
nothing would be owed between them (3BK 3).
In contrast, Panurge invokes Ficinian Platonism
in his vision of a world of debtors and borrowers
exchanging in perfect harmony (3BK 4). In point
of fact, the circulation of blood among the organs
of the body is not an accurate representation of
credit, which implies an abstraction of the proc-
ess of exchange and includes the concept of risk.
However, Marx has indicated that the primitive
basis of credit is a delay of the process of buying
and selling because when the process of buying
is separated in time from the process of selling,
relations of debtor and creditor are created, his-
torically before the credit system is established
(qtd. in Lavatori 1996: 73). Thus, through Pan-
urge, Rabelais can present credit as a naturally
occurring phenomenon.
Nevertheless, identifying debts with lies, Pan-
tagruel condemns Panurge as a sophist who is
defending an immoral cause and literally making
money out of his abuse of sophisticated rhetoric
(3BK 5). Pantagruel sees borrowing as a last re-
sort for desperate situations and not as a means
of increasing spending opportunities without
working for them and producing true wealth as
a byproduct (3BK 5). Siding with Plato in his
Laws and the conservative bourgeoisie in its
practices, Pantagruel condemns loans that are not
productive and only permit consuming beyond
resources (Paris 1970: 180). Pantagruel ulti-
mately pays Panurge’s debts and authoritatively
ends the debate, simply telling Panurge to drop
the issue (3BK 5). Jean-Christophe Deberre
(1983) shows that this generosity reflects the
Decretals 49
French monarchy’s obliging and yoking of the
country’s middle class in order to control the
country and its productivity. According to De-
berre’s logic, in order to deserve his gift and re-
pay his debt to the monarch, Panurge must marry
and produce descendants, which is confirmed by
the discussion of Panurge’s potential marriage,
which follows the praise of debt (19–20).
Although Panurge is in effect persuaded to
give up debt, pledging to become the perfect
householder and sporting the spectacles of the
archetypal Jan Bourgeoys in chapter 7, his de-
fense of debts is a depiction of the new oppor-
tunities offered by the creative economic practice
of credit, just as the book itself is a representation
of the productivity of verbal signs from its iden-
tification with Diogenes rolling his tub in the
prologue. In Panurge’s tirade, the borrowing and
lending of the parts of the body result in its per-
petuation through the eventual creation of off-
spring. Similarly, Zegura (1993) indicates that
debt itself can be seen as a metaphor for the lit-
erary borrowing characteristic of the Renais-
sance, which allowed sixteenth-century writers to
interact profitably with ancient texts in the re-
newal of antiquity and the generation of new
meanings (95–96).
Readings: Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La généalogie
du pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,”
Littérature 50 (May 1983): 15–35; Gerard Lavatori,
Language and Money in Rabelais (New York: Peter
Lang, 1996); Michael Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1979); Jean Paris, Rabelais
au futur (Paris: Seuil, 1970); Elizabeth Chesney Ze-
gura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York:
Twayne, 1993).
Gerard Lavatori
DECRETALS (LES DÉCRÉTALES) (4BK 48–
54) The power of canon law and its application
to the practice of everyday life in France pro-
vides the material for Rabelais’s satire of the
supporters of the Church who put Rome above
both Christian charity and the smooth running
of public order in France. In the twelfth century,
Gratian sought to organize canon law into the
document that became known as the Decretum,
which Pope Gregory IV later organized into
five books. Subsequent books were added: Liber
Sixtus, by Boniface VIII, Clementinae, under
50 Decretals
Clement V, and finally Extravagantes by John
XXII.
Arriving at the Island of the Papimaniacs
(L’Isle des Papimanes), Pantagruel and his
band discover that the same Decretals have be-
come the object of adoration, along with the
Pope himself, by the Papimaniacs and their
bishop, Homenaz. Through his satire, Rabelais
attacks the power of the Decretals to protect the
clergy against civil and royal authority in France.
As Pantagruel touches the gold volume covered
with “fine and precious stones” that holds the text
of the Decretals, he confesses to having an urge
to hit the local civil officers, as long as they are
not clerics (“provided that they are not tonsured”
[4BK 49]). French humanists resented both the
revenues flooding toward Rome and the ability
of the Church to exempt its clergy from civil law.
The chapters devoted to the Papimaniacs de-
velop an elaborate satirical eulogy of the Decre-
tals, using the same rhetorical devices that we
find in the Praise of Debtors (3BK 3–4) and in
the Praise of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52):
enumeration, interrogation, exclamation. Hom-
enaz posits a world held in harmony by the De-
cretals. However, it is not the vision of Christian
harmony set forth by Erasmus and the evangel-
ists who would reform the Church from within,
but, as Edwin Duval has shown, an anticaritas,
based on the witch hunt against heresy. Hyper-
bolic rhetoric (“O seraphique Sixiesme,” “O
cherubicques Clementines” “O Extravaguantes
angelicques”) combining the names of the later
books of the Decretals with the bands of angels
used as descriptors underscores the author’s pa-
rodic intention (Duval 1998: 74). The vision
seems to illustrate the image of Christian char-
ity, except that heretics will be excluded. Indeed,
Homenaz predicts that those who read the texts
will be inflamed “with charity toward [their]
neighbor, as long as he is not a heretic” (4BK
51).
Unconvinced by the inflated rhetoric of the
bishop of Papimanie, Pantagruel and his friends
engage in debasing the sacred object, the Decre-
tals, by putting them to unseemly use: toilet pa-
per, wrapping for medicine, patterns for dress-
making, and face masks. But the Decretals end
up spoiling everything with which they come in
contact. For each misapplication of the “holy”
book and subsequent bungled task, Homenaz
cries “Miracle! Miracle!”
With a final flourish, Homenaz recommends a
Decretalist for all positions of responsibility: em-
peror, captain, general, governor, crusader, and
so on. Without the Decretals, all the universities
of the world would perish. Worn out by the
sound of his own rhetoric, Homenaz dissolves
into tears, beats his chest, and piously and pre-
tentiously kisses his thumbs, arranged in the form
of a cross.
The substantive authority in the Papimanie ep-
isode lies not with the empty rhetoric of its
bishop, but with Pantagruel and his friends.
Homenaz’s inflated prose bursts and deflates
when attacked by the vivid language evoking the
lower stratum used by Pantagruel and his band.
Repulsed by Homenaz’s reverence for the inap-
propriate substitute (the Decretals) for the true
word of God as reflected in the Holy Scriptures,
Epistémon runs straight to the toilet (“selle per-
sée”), complaining that the “farce has loosened
[his] bowels” (“ceste farce me a desbondé le
boyau cullier” [4BK 51]). Contemplation of the
Decretals has the opposite effect on Panurge:
“Upon reading [them] I was so constipated that
for more than four or five days I shat only a tiny
ball of dung” (“à la lecture d’icelluy je ne feuz
tant constipé du ventre que par plus de quatre,
voyre cinq jours je ne fiantay qu’une petite
crotte” [52]). In order to vilify an official object
that has profited the Church at the expense of the
faithful, Rabelais contrasts the empty praise of
the unworthy, yet official object with the tough
and practical language of the “place publique”
(Bakhtin 1970: 167). True evangelism seeks not
to idolize or worship commentary and texts de-
veloped by the popes, whom the Papimaniacs
falsely adore as “this good God on earth” (“ce
bon Dieu en terre”), but to understand the word
of God, as transmitted in the Bible, and to prac-
tice true caritas, to be accorded even to sinners
and heretics.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de François
Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen âge et sous
la renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard,
1970); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart
Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Deborah

Losse, Rhetoric at Play, Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1980).
Deborah Nichols Losse
DES PÉRIERS, BONAVENTURE (c. 1510–c.
1544) Bonaventure would be known only as a
talented but minor poet and as the equally tal-
ented writer of amusing short stories were it not
for the affair of the Cymbalum Mundi, a little
book first published pseudonymously in 1537
and again less than a year later. It was quickly
denounced to the religious authorities, judged to
be pernicious, and ruthlessly suppressed. Its first
publisher was imprisoned, and only one copy of
the first edition and two of the second survive.
In 1538 André Zébédée, a Protestant cleric, de-
nounced the Cymbalum as the work of an Epi-
curean who had been a collaborator on Pierre
Olivétan’s Protestant translation of the Bible:
only Des Périers can possibly fit the bill. How-
ever, this letter was only discovered in the twen-
tieth century. In 1543 Guillaume Postel dis-
missed the Cymbalum as the subversive work of
a former Protestant sympathizer, and in 1550
John Calvin excoriated it in his De Scandalis.
Further denunciations of Des Périers followed
thick and fast, but all of them were much later
than the date of Des Périers’s death: no conclu-
sions could therefore be drawn about the author-
ship of the Cymbalum until the discovery of Zé-
bédée’s letter. The book itself remained
notorious, legendary even, until the surviving
editions were discovered and copies were clan-
destinely circulated. An edition eventually fol-
lowed in 1711, quickly followed by three others.
There have been no fewer than three modern crit-
ical editions, whose interpretations vary sharply.
The critical debate still rages, and the question
is, and always was, is the book a satire of Chris-
tianity? On balance, it is difficult to deny the ac-
cusation. The Cymbalum is a work of savage yet
delicate irony denouncing the cruelties and idi-
ocies of society, for which religion appears
mainly responsible. Its dialogues wrap their
sense in allusion and ambiguity, full of clues that
always leave an escape route for their author in
that there is always another possible interpreta-
tion. Born of the absolute necessity for its author
Devils and Demonology 51
to veil his meaning in order to avoid horrible
punishment, it is truly a unique masterpiece.
Readings: Le Cymbalum Mundi, ed. Franco Gia-
cone (Geneva: Droz, 2003); Max Gauna, “Pour une
nouvelle interpretation du Cymbalum Mundi,” Lettre
Clandestine 6 (1997): 157–72; Max Gauna, Upwell-
ings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Lit-
erature of the French Renaissance (Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992).
Max Gauna
DEVILS AND DEMONOLOGY Rabelais’s
novels contain numerous references to devils and
demonology, the medieval and early modern
“science” describing evil suprahuman beings.
Most of Rabelais’s references are facetious or
comical; several are satirical. Traditionally, Ra-
belais’s demonological references have been
traced to medieval folklore and theater: Panta-
gruel borrows his name from a diminutive the-
atrical demon who tormented drunkards by fill-
ing their throats with salt. Panurge claims
familiarity with devils, and the language of Ra-
belais’s characters, particularly Panurge and
Frère Jean, is filled with references to devils. At
the end of Pantagruel, the narrator promises to
recount in a later book how Pantagruel and his
companions traveled to Hell, set fire to five of
its rooms, sacked another, threw Proserpina in
the fire, and maimed Lucifer by breaking four of
his teeth and a horn on his backside (P 34). Sim-
ilar exploits are in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus
(which, however, leaves its heroes stranded in
Hell). The Fourth Book narrates peasant en-
counters with devils (45–47) and ends when Pan-
urge battles the cat Rodilardus, whom he mis-
takes for a devil (67).
Like giants, demons were figures of grotesque
corporeality. Whereas giants were characterized
by exaggerated stature, devils’ bodies were sys-
tematically incongruous. Art of circa 1460 to
1520 depicts the bodies of demons as riotously
hybrid: not only inappropriately placed horns,
but also faces on buttocks, knees, and bellies and
mixed mammalian, insect, reptilian, and crusta-
cean forms. (Incongruity afflicted the other races
that Rabelais says [P 1] originated at the same
time as giants, but these more clearly recall the
Plinian “monstrous” races, since their otherwise
52 Dindenault
normal physique exaggerated only one feature:
ears, noses, penises, etc.)
“Scientific” demonology between about 1400
and 1700 increasingly emphasized the corpore-
ality of demons. Public officials actively inves-
tigated demons as the instigators of “witchcraft,”
defined as the transfer of maleficent power from
demons to witches through a pact or contractual
relationship. Ecclesiastical and lay officials
sought evidence of this relationship even when
no maleficia (specific acts of harmful magic)
were alleged against defendants. The most spec-
tacular and fantastic features of witchcraft—fly-
ing, sexual relations between women and de-
mons, and attendance at the sabbat (a transfer of
Satan’s court from Hell to earth)—were ex-
tracted from defendants as “confessions” and
prosecuted as evidence of verifiable, corporeal
contact between humans and demons. Treatises
on witchcraft, written by learned theologians and
magistrates, invoked this “evidence” to refute
skepticism about the reality of angels and de-
mons, which they feared was becoming wide-
spread. When Pantagruel advises Panurge to con-
sult the Sibyl of Panzoust, it cannot be accidental
that Epistémon, the most learned of the giant’s
companions, cites classical precedents for fearing
she is a witch (3BK 16). Panurge, reacting more
viscerally, experiences the same fear when he
sees her divinatory rituals (17).
Evidence of demonic corporeality was needed
to offset the theological definition of angels and
devils as pure or incorporeal spirits. Paradoxi-
cally, since demons had no bodies of their own,
they could confect bodies, which, being artificial,
were not constrained by the normal physiology
of human and animal species.
Rabelais’s delight in describing demons im-
plicates both his insight that exaggeration is fun-
damentally comic and his ambivalent delight in
mocking superstition and religious intolerance.
Panurge’s cowardice and illogic animate his fear
of devils, while the little demon of Book Four
informs a peasant that his land is forfeit to devils
because the Pope has excommunicated the dis-
respectful “Popefigs.” Conversely, Rabelais’s rel-
ative neglect of the theme of witchcraft may be
a historical accident: between the 1520s and the
1570s, witchcraft persecutions and the produc-
tion of witchcraft treatises declined as Western
Christians struggled through the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation, but resumed fero-
ciously from about 1580 to 1630, before gradu-
ally disappearing from scholarly attention.
Rabelais’s early phrase “jusqu’au feu exclusive-
ment” (only as far as the stake [P prol]) reflects
the reality of campaigns against all heresy, not
just witchcraft.
Readings: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The
Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997); Brian Levack, The
Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: Longman, 1995); Walter Stephens, Demon Lov-
ers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Walter Stephens
DINDENAULT (4BK 5–6) In the Fourth
Book, a sheep merchant from Taillebourg in
Saintonge whom Pantagruel and his companions
encountered while at sea. Dindenault calls Pan-
urge a cuckold, provoking a conflict that esca-
lates until a peace is imposed between them. Pan-
urge, true to form, neither forgives nor forgets
and plots to undo the sheep merchant. He ne-
gotiates the purchase of a sheep from him, and
Dindenault responds by outlandishly exaggerat-
ing the value of his animals. Panurge accepts the
merchant’s price, selects the largest ram of the
herd, and throws it overboard. The rest of the
sheep follow, with Dindenault and the other
shepherds jumping in after them in a desperate
effort to prevent the loss of the flock. Panurge,
using an oar, makes sure that none return on
board ship, preaching to them as they drown
about the misery of this life and the pleasure of
the next.
The Dindenault episode, whose theme was
borrowed from the Maccheronee of Merlin Coc-
caie (pseudonym of Teofilo Folengo), is super-
ficially similar to that of the Haughty Parisian
Lady: an offended Panurge exacts a dispropor-
tionate revenge on an unwitting victim and con-
siders the whole to be great sport. The episode
restores Panurge’s reputation as a trickster,
which was clearly established in Pantagruel but
seemingly abandoned along with his codpiece in
the Third Book. Reading further into the episode,
it also serves as a stark reminder of the degree

to which Panurge is truly a fallen creature, high-
lighting his cowardice and vengeful nature.
The incident is rich in meaning. The punish-
ment the sheep merchant receives for his gro-
tesque exaggerations reminds the reader of the
lesson of moderation detailed in the tale of
Couillatris in the prologue to the Fourth Book.
In addition, by calling Panurge a cuckold, Din-
denault recalls the transformation Panurge un-
derwent at the beginning of the Third Book and
reminds us that the purpose of the voyage to con-
sult the Divine Bottle is to settle the question of
Panurge’s marriage. Of equal interest, by refer-
ring to Panurge as a “belle médaille de coqü,”
Dindenault allies himself with the Sibyl of Pan-
zoust, Nazdecabre the mute, Triboullet the fool,
and the other oracles of the Third Book who in-
dicated that after marriage Panurge would be
cuckolded, beaten, and robbed. Panurge’s refusal
to accept this prediction is the reason Pantagruel
and company undertake this voyage to consult
yet another oracle. His forced reinterpretation of
their common message illustrates the kind of de-
liberate misreading of text that Rabelais feared
and denounced, notably in the Letter to Odet de
Chastillon and throughout the Fourth Book.
Other readings of this incident note that by de-
stroying sheep and shepherds, Panurge symboli-
cally commits violence against Christ and his fol-
lowers. Defying the biblical injunction against
revenge (“Vengeance is mine. It’s in the prayer
book,” as Frère Jan says in the last line of chap-
ter 8), Panurge brings upon himself and his fel-
low travelers the trials that will follow.
Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-
trophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Ra-
belais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).
Douglas L. Boudreau
DIOGENES THE CYNIC (413 B.C.–327 B.C.)
A moral philosopher who advocated a life led
according to nature and despised social conven-
tions. As a character in Rabelais, Diogenes
makes five more or less satirical appearances. On
visiting the underworld (P 30), Epistémon finds
Diogenes living in luxury and thrashing Alex-
ander the Great, who has become a cobbler. His
imaginary treatment of Alexander reflects the
historical Diogenes’s contempt for wealth and
Diogenes the Cynic 53
rank. But insofar as he had been notoriously
poor, this is a case of role reversal, akin to others
that Epistémon witnesses.
Two references concern Diogenes’s pro-
nouncements on appetites. He is reported to have
called lust “an occupation for people with noth-
ing else to do” (3BK 31). And in a discussion
about the times of day when one should eat, Pan-
tagruel quotes him as saying, “A rich man, when
hungry; a poor man, when he has the means”
(4BK 64); the first half of the maxim conveys
scorn for social conventions, while the second
adds harsh realism.
Diogenes is also the hero of two anecdotes.
One is told when Pantagruel visits Papimanie, a
land of fanatics who worship the Pope and ven-
erate everything associated with him, including
the Decretals (published papal rulings on issues
of doctrine and canon law). Homenaz, bishop of
Papimanie, extols at length the allegedly mirac-
ulous effects of these texts (4BK 51). Unimpres-
sed by his list of fanciful miracles, Pantagruel
and his companions mock it with a list of equally
fanciful mishaps, which they ascribe equally to
the Decretals. When Gymnaste describes an
archery contest in Guyenne which was vitiated
because the arrows would not hit a target made
from an old volume of Decretals, the tale re-
minds Pantagruel of Diogenes: having watched a
bad archer shoot so wide of the mark that the
spectators retreated in fear, he stood next to the
target, asserting that it was the only safe place
(52). The story shows Diogenes’s independence
of mind and his aptitude for the telling gesture
which, here, highlights both the archer’s inepti-
tude and the crowd’s timidity and illogicality.
But why does Diogenes feature here? The point
of his presence may lie, partly at least, in the
nature of the Papimanes, who are a servile mob.
On hearing that Pantagruel and company have
seen the Pope, they kneel and spend the next
quarter of an hour exclaiming, “Oh blessed ones”
(49). But their servility is not merely comical,
since it can be used for sinister purposes. Thus,
they are led to butcher and humiliate their neigh-
bors the Papefigues for one insulting gesture. In
such a context, the reader can easily see the value
of independence from the crowd, as exemplified
by Diogenes.
The other story concerns Diogenes in Corinth,
54 Dipsodes
when Philip of Macedonia threatened to attack
the city (3BK prol.). The Corinthians made fran-
tic warlike preparations. After watching for some
days, Diogenes took the tub in which he lived,
knocked it about, pushed it up a hill, let it roll
down, pushed it back up, and so on. The nar-
rator underlines the inherent futility of this ac-
tivity, likening it to Sisyphus with his rock.
When asked, Diogenes explained that he was try-
ing “not to appear the only idle person amid all
this busy population.” The explanation clearly
focuses on appearances. It may imply that the
Corinthians were too stupid to distinguish be-
tween substantial military preparations, such as
building defensive works, and Diogenes’s
equally energetic but wholly futile tub-rolling. In
addition, the answer may be taken to mean that
defense-building and tub-rolling really are equiv-
alent—both are equally pointless. Whichever
one’s interpretation, Diogenes’s activity and his
ostensible explanation of it imply a scathing crit-
icism of the Corinthians. Highlighted in the pro-
logue, this episode foreshadows a theme of fu-
tility which runs through much of the Third
Book. The book is largely devoted to Panurge
and his inchoate wish to marry. Because he is
growing old and fears that his still hypothetical
wife will cuckold him, Panurge repeatedly seeks
advice and, above all, reassurance. But Panta-
gruel advises him (10) that he must simply make
up his own mind and, thereafter, accept his lot.
This implies, obviously, that pursuing advice is
futile and that Panurge’s many consultations are
no more useful than Diogenes’s tub-rolling or the
Corinthians’ military preparations.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997);
Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Ian R. Morrison
DIPSODES Dipsodes, or the thirsty, were the
subjects of Anarche (without authority), the king
who invaded Utopia in Pantagruel. V.-L. Saul-
nier identified them in his TLF edition as inhab-
itants of Pantagruel’s domain, but the confusion
is understandable, since Rabelais confused his
fictional domains as well: Pantagruel awarded
Salmagundi to the author himself at the end of
Pantagruel (TLF 22; P 32)—then to Panurge at
the beginning of the Third Book (2). In spite of
several references to Utopia in Pantagruel, Tho-
mas More’s ideas (in particular his scorn for the
body [Utopia 2.176.10–11]) had little influence
on those of Rabelais. The encomium of skill over
force in Pantagruel’s heroic verses (TLF 17; P
27) was paralleled by More (2.202), but it was a
commonplace of humanist writing on warfare.
Although the Abbey of Thélème was the most
utopian passage in Rabelais’s novels, there were
no explicit evocations of More in Gargantua.
Utopia did reappear in the first chapter of the
Third Book, only immediately to disappear again,
this time for good. Rabelais disagreed explicitly
with More: Pantagruel colonized Dipsodia not
because of the excess population in his own lands
(TLF 10–22; P 20–32; cf. Utopia 2.136.4–21),
but rather in order to persuade his new subjects
to revere him as did those he transported there.
Guillaume du Bellay adopted a similar tactic
when he was appointed royal governor in Turin;
Guillaume and his brother Jean, the bishop of
Paris, were Rabelais’s mentors and patrons, and
they advocated a political course opposed to
More’s. They pursued greater independence for
European monarchs like their king, Francis I—
or his, Henry VIII—and were suspicious of any
such pan-European authority as the Holy Roman
emperor, or the Pope.
Readings: Edward Benson, “ ‘Jamais votre femme
ne sera ribaulde, si la prenez issue de gens de bien’:
Love and War in the Tiers livre,” ER 15 (1980): 55–
64; Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H.
Hexter, bk. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1965); V.-L. Saulnier, ed., Pantagruel, Textes litter-
aires français (Geneva: Droz, 1965).
Edward Benson
DISCIPLE OF PANTAGRUEL (LE DISCI-
PLE DE PANTAGRUEL) An anonymous
work of comic geography which recounts the
voyage of Panurge and his companions around
a series of marvelous islands. The work uses ma-
terial and characters from Pantagruel and was,
in turn, used by Rabelais in the composition of
the Fourth Book, and by the author(s) or com-
piler(s) of the Fifth Book. The first dated edition
of the Disciple was produced at Lyon in 1538,
though an undated version exists which may
have been printed as early as 1533. It enjoyed a

vogue as a separate text until 1547, when it
ceased to be published on its own and was
thereafter included in various editions of Rabe-
lais’s collected Oeuvres, thereby blurring the dis-
tinctions between authentic and para-Rabelaisian
works, particularly for readers in the latter half
of the century who may have been unfamiliar
with the earlier publishing history. Twenty-two
editions in all of the Disciple de Pantagruel are
known to have been printed under various titles:
Panurge is the hero of the first five editions, but
from 1544 onward the eponymous hero becomes
“Bringuenarilles, cousin germain de Fesse-
pinte.” In the first five editions, Bringuenarilles
was an evil giant encountered by Panurge and
companions. The initial use of a Rabelaisian
character as hero of a comic work testifies to the
early success of Rabelais’s own creation, a suc-
cess upon which the author(s) or compiler(s) of
the Disciple attempted to capitalize, or at least to
keep interest in this character alive. Editions pro-
duced after 1545 include two chapters lifted ver-
batim from the 1542 edition of Pantagruel and
material from Les croniques admirables (a late
non-Rabelaisian Chronique gargantuine), with-
out regard for textual cohesion. Taking advan-
tage of the evident popularity of the Disciple de
Pantagruel, Rabelais himself used elements of
the episodes of the Disciple in the composition
of both versions of the Fourth Book: for exam-
ple, the general structure of a voyage to various
marvelous islands, the description of the “pays
des Lanternes,” the account of the windmill-
swallowing giant Bringuenarilles, the description
of the “Isle Farouche” and the “Isle des An-
douilles” (which Rabelais runs together and can
be seen to have been taken from the 1547 edition
of La navigation du compaignon à la Bouteille).
Similar use is made by the author(s) or com-
piler(s) of the Fifth Book (for example, the de-
scription of the “Isle des Ferrements” [Toolmak-
ing Island]), and in particular the list of “basses
dances” which, from its orthography and dispo-
sition on the page, can be seen to have been
taken from Etienne Dolet’s 1542 edition of the
Merveilleuses navigations du disciple de Panta-
gruel, dict Panurge, bound with his important
pirated editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua.
Readings: Geoffrey Atkinson, La littérature géo-
graphique française de la Renaissance: répertoire bib-
Dogs 55
liographique (Paris, 1927 rpt. New York: B. Franklin,
1968); Le Disciple de Pantagruel, ed. Guy Demerson
and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière (Paris: Nizet,
1982); Abel Lefranc, Les Navigations de Pantagruel
(Paris, 1905; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967); John
Lewis, “Rabelais and the Disciple de Pantagruel,” ER
22 (1989): 101–22; J. Schober, Rabelais’ Verhältnis
zum Disciple de Pantagruel (Munich: Buchdruckerai
von F. Stein, 1904).
John Lewis
DIVINATION See Prophecy and Divination
DOGS Rabelais seems to have had an interest
in dogs. They appear here and there in the first
three books and seem to be symbolic or emblem-
atic of points he is trying to make in the texts
themselves.
The first anecdote involving dogs is, of course,
the famous episode of the Haughty Parisian
Lady (P 22). As revenge for his rejection by this
lady, Panurge cuts up the sexual organs of a
bitch in heat and sprinkles them over the lady,
who is then pursued and urinated on by more
than 600,000 dogs (as Panurge had himself been
pursued by dogs in chapter 14). Intepretations of
this episode range from Rabelais’s turning the
lady herself into a bitch in heat (Freccero 61); to
an exercise in rhetoric (Bowen 110); to an evan-
gelical parallel with the humiliation of Christ by
Roman soldiers, in the Book of Matthew (Rigo-
lot 1994: 230). Most seem to agree, however,
that Rabelais is reminding the haughty dame that
humans have a physical side, which links them
with animals.
The second well-known reference to a dog is
in the “Prologe” to Gargantua, where the reader
is invited to imitate the “philosophical dog” from
Plato’s Republic (2.71–173). He should break
open the bone and suck out the marrow inside.
Most readers have assumed that this analogy sug-
gests that the book contains more meaning on the
inside than appears on the outside—it is one of
the more “reader-centered” discussions of inter-
pretation in the book. The dog provides a pow-
erful visual image that shows humans and ani-
mals to be alike, even when performing the
cerebral activity of reading.
A third reference to a dog is found in the
Third Book (35). There, Pantagruel sees Gar-
56 Dolet, Etienne
gantua’s dog, Kyne, entering the room and de-
duces that his master is not far away. Here schol-
ars have seen a reference to the biblical Book of
Tobit and an endorsement of the conception of
marriage contained there (Céard 332; Screech
243). The dog also provides an interesting link
to Marguerite de Navarre, who makes a similar
reference in the Suyte des Margverites of 1547,
thus leading some to believe that Marguerite her-
self had read the Third Book and that she was
commenting obliquely on it, as well as on the
Book of Tobit (Bauschatz 396; Frank 248). The
dog appears as a symbol of fidelity in marriage
and as an emblem of the need to combine the
spiritual and the physical within that relationship.
Whether or not Rabelais was a dog lover, the
dog becomes an important symbol in his work.
This symbol is sometimes used to deflate human
presumption and at other times to suggest posi-
tive values such as tenacity and fidelity, which
humans share with animals.
Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and
Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of
Clandestine Marriage,” SCJ 34.2 (2003): 395–408;
Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nash-
ville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Jean
Céard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVII
siècle en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Carla Frec-
cero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the
Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15
(1985): 57–67; Marguerite de Navarre, Les Margue-
rites de la Marguerite des Princesses, ed. Felix Frank
(Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1873); Plato, “The
Republic,” Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W.H.D.
Rouse (New York: Penguin Books, 1984); François
Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity:
Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of
Exemplarity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 225–37.
Cathleen M. Bauschatz
DOLET, ETIENNE (1509–46) Dolet was
born in Orléans, educated there until age twelve,
studied in Paris with Nicholas Bérauld until
1526, and from 1526 to 1529 in Padua with
Simon Villanovanus. Briefly secretary to the
bishop of Limoges, he studied law at Toulouse
until 1534. During two fiery orations, Dolet al-
ienated members of Parlement and conservative
religious factions by attacking Toulouse for its
attitude toward his fraternity. He was briefly im-
prisoned and expelled from the city in 1534, af-
terward moving to Lyon, working as proofreader
for Sebastian Gryphius and Claude Nourry.
He counted Guillaume and Maurice Scève and
François Rabelais among his friends. Dolet pub-
lished his Orations in 1534, dialogues against
Erasmus in 1535, and volume 1 of his monu-
mental Commentaries on the Latin Language in
1536 (volume 2 in 1538). The Commentaries at-
tacked both the Gallican Church and the Calvin-
ists, earning Dolet the hatred of both extremes.
In 1536 Dolet was attacked in a street in Lyon,
killing his adversary in self-defense. He traveled
on foot to Paris and received pardon from King
Francis I. Among the guests at the celebratory
banquet were Guillaume Budé, Salmon Macrin,
Nicolas Bourbon, Clement Marot, and François
Rabelais. Dolet married in 1538; his son Claude
was born a year later. Now an independent
printer, Dolet published the Genethliacum, ad-
vice to his son. He earned the enmity of many
Lyonnese printers as their rival and as an advo-
cate of workers’ rights. Perhaps at their instiga-
tion, he was imprisoned in 1542 for printing “he-
retical” books. He was tried in Lyon, transferred
to Paris, and received another royal pardon in
1543, thanks to the intercession of Pierre Duchâ-
tel, bishop of Tulle. Rearrested in 1544 on a
trumped-up charge, he escaped briefly to Pied-
mont, but was caught and condemned to the
stake. He was executed on his birthday, August
3, 1546, at the Place Maubert.
Readings: Jacques Alary, L’imprimerie au XVIe siè-
cle: Estienne Dolet et ses luttes avec la Sorbonne (Ge-
neva: Slatkine, 1970); Richard C. Christie, Etienne
Dolet: The Martyr of the Renaissance (London:
Macmillan, 1880); Etudes sur Etienne Dolet; le Théâ-
tre au XVIe siècle, publiées à la mémoire de Claude
Longeon (Geneva: Droz, 1993).
Florence M. Weinberg
DORIBUS (D’ORIBUS, DORISIUS) The
1542 Pantagruel (22) appended a passage about
“nostre maistre d’Oribus” who preached that the
Bièvre River flowing through the Parisian suburb
of Saint-Victor had as its source the urine of
Paris street dogs. Since the title “nostre maistre”
was reserved exclusively for Parisian doctors of
theology, the preacher lampooned here has been
thought to be either Matthieu Ory or Pierre Doré.

Matthieu Ory, a Dominican friar born in about
1492 near Saint-Malo (Brittany), took the doc-
torate in theology in 1528. In 1536 King Francis
I named him as an inquisitor and, in 1539, as
inquisitor general in France. Ory actively sup-
ported censorship of heretical books, helped to
convict and execute Etienne Dolet for heresy,
and has been seen as one of the instigators of the
Parlement of Paris’s “Chambre ardente” in the
early 1550s. In 1554, at the request of Duke Er-
cole II d’Este of Ferrara, King Henry II sent Ory
to Italy to convert the duke’s wife Renée de
France away from the Reformation. John Cal-
vin wrote a tract against Ory’s defense of images
in religion; but Calvin and Ory collaborated in
the arrest of the anti-Trinitarian heretic Michael
Servetus. Ory died in 1557.
Pierre Doré, also a Dominican friar and Pari-
sian doctor of theology (1532), was born in Or-
léans circa 1497. He was a popular preacher in
Paris during the 1530s and 1540s, and authored
thirty-five books, most of them collections of his
sermons printed in French and many of them re-
printed several times. His sermons drew heavily
on Sacred Scripture, and he became a principal
voice of Catholic orthodoxy for the people of
Paris. In 1554 he became chaplain and spiritual
director to Claude de Guise, duke of Lorraine,
and to several other prominent persons in the
court of the Guise. He died in 1569.
Readings: James K. Farge, “Doré, Pierre,” Bio-
graphical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology,
1500–1536 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval
Studies, 1980), no. 151: 137–42; James K. Farge, “Ory
Matthieu,” Biographical Register, no. 372: 353–56;
Francis Higman, “Premières réponses catholiques aux
écrits de la Réforme en France, 1525–c. 1540,” Le
livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (N.p.: Promo-
dis, 1988); John A. Langlois, A Catholic Response in
Sixteenth-Century France to Reformation Theology:
The Works of Pierre Doré (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mel-
len Press, 2003); Nathanaël Weiss, La chambre ar-
dente: étude sur la liberté de conscience en France
sous François Ier et Henri II, 1540–1550 (Paris:
Fischbacher, 1889).
James K. Farge
DREAM OF PANTAGRUEL (LE SONGE DE
PANTAGRUEL) A para-Rabelaisian work
composed by François Habert and printed by
Dream of Pantagruel 57
Adam Saulnier at Paris in 1542. No other edi-
tions are known. Up until that date Habert was
known as a competent poet of allegorical verse,
but the Songe stands out from his other works in
both its didactic intent and in its use of Rabelai-
sian characters to promote views that are never
explicitly expressed in authentic Rabelaisian
chronicles. In the Songe, published during Ra-
belais’s absence in Italy, Habert appears to sup-
port the facultative marriage of the clergy. The
issue was an important one to all major figures
of the Reformation; many were married men
themselves who could find no scriptural evidence
that prohibited such marriage. Even Erasmus ad-
mits in some early letters that he can find no such
evidence, though he prefers priests and ministers
to be free from the cares of marriage and able to
devote themselves to the love and service of
God. Rabelais himself never discusses the issue;
the closest he comes to it in his fiction is to de-
scribe marriage as an honorable institution. In his
“contr’abbaye,” the Thelemites are not obliged to
marry, but if they choose to do so, then they must
leave the Abbey (G 50).
Habert constructs his text around three
dreams; in the first (ll. 18–472) the dead Gar-
gantua appears to his son to advise him that the
way to wisdom lies in following the Gospels. Pan
the Great Shepherd left a book that tells Man
how to find true happiness by becoming a shep-
herd after the manner of Tityre (Saint Peter) and
by shunning the contemporary abusive practices
of high ecclesiastics. In the second, more light-
hearted, dream (ll. 477–590), Panurge describes
his imprisonment at the hands of the Turks and
his escape with the help of Melusine, daughter
of the Sultan; his adventures are loosely based
on those described in Pantagruel 10. In the third
dream (ll. 595–676), Gargantua reappears to his
son to reinforce his advice that the son should
become a berger or shepherd after the manner of
those priests of the Primitive Church; just as
those priests were allowed to marry if they chose
to do so, so contemporary priests should have the
same option, choosing a virtuous and pious
woman as companion. The Songe has also been
interpreted as having suggested to Rabelais some
of the episodes familiar from his later chroni-
cles—for example, the whole debate about the
advantages and disadvantages of marriage and
58 Dreams
the qualities to be sought in a good wife, Pan-
urge’s discussion of debts and debtors (Songe,
ll. 556–586), even the equation of the Shepherd
God Pan with Christ familiar from the moving
syncretism of the finished Fourth Book.
Readings: Alice Hulubei, L’Eglogue en France au
XVIe siècle (1515–1589) (Paris: Droz 1938); Henry
Lea, A History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian
Church, 2 vols. (London: Watts & Co. 1907); John
Lewis, “François Habert, Le Songe de Pantagruel,”
ER 18 (1985):103–62.
John Lewis
DREAMS Rabelais’s writing shows little in-
terest in dreams before 1546. He sometimes uses
the words resveur (dreamer) or songe-creux as
terms of abuse; and in an Epistre to Jean Bouchet
of c. 1527 he explores the hallucinations brought
on by melancholy (OC 1022–1023); but he does
not involve dreams in the fabric of his fiction
until chapters 13–14 of the Third Book. Besides
the professional interest in dreams shown by any
Renaissance doctor, Rabelais’s particular fic-
tional use of this theme owes something to one
of his own imitators, François Habert, who in
1542 had published his Songe de Pantagruel, a
verse continuation of Rabelais’s earlier book.
Habert imagines Pantagruel dreaming of future
adventures concerning his own forthcoming
marriage, including a dream of a banquet in
which sages offer him advice, a dream of Pan-
urge returning from Babylon, and a dream of his
father Gargantua coming back from the dead.
This “songe tresprospere” (“very favorable
dream”) clearly helped to shape the future Third
Book. Although poets had long made use of the
device of the dreamlike vision of divine, pro-
phetic inspiration, this has no role in Rabelais’s
fiction.
In the Renaissance the most widely practiced
and most widely accepted form of natural magic
was oniromancy, the interpretation of dreams.
Humanists were familiar with the classical trea-
tises on the subject by Hippocrates, Aristotle,
Artemidorus, the Neoplatonic work by Synesius,
and especially the famous commentary of Ma-
crobius on the Dream of Scipio, which was a
best-seller in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
They might also have some knowledge of Arabic
scholarship on dreams, especially the writing of
Albumazar.
Divination by dreams is one of the dozen or
more methods Panurge used to ascertain the fu-
ture of his marriage (3BK 13–14). Some critics
have thought that Rabelais was mocking the in-
terpretation of dreams in these chapters and that
he was broadly skeptical of divination. Both
views have little foundation. Pantagruel specifi-
cally commends this method, and he cites all the
above classical authorities, and several others, in
order to prove that this form of divination is
“good, ancient, and authentic” (“bonne . . . , an-
tique, et authenticque” [OC 388]). Biblical prec-
edents added further prestige to this method, no-
tably the examples of Daniel, who had
interpreted the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan-
iel 2, 4), and of Joseph, who had explained those
of Pharoah (Genesis 40–41). Thus Pantagruel
concludes: “Sacred texts bear witness [to the
power of dreams], profane histories confirm it”
(“Les sacres letres le tesmoignent, les histoires
prophanes l’asceurent” [OC 389]). This method
gives an answer to Panurge consistent with the
other methods he attempts.
The name of Daniel in particular was associ-
ated with a medieval dreambook, which circu-
lated in manuscript throughout Europe, and of
which French editions exist: The Dreams of Dan-
iel the Prophet, translated from Latin into
French (Les Songes Daniel prophete, translatez
de latin en Françoys [c. 1510]). Although this
manual provided interpretations for a popular
readership, its material was reworked by contem-
porary physicians, who were commonly involved
in oniromancy. One of these, a physician to
Francis I, was Jean Thibault, who in the 1530s
published a work on dreams, The Physiognomy
of Dreams and Fantastic Visions (La Phision-
omie des songes et visions fantastiques des per-
sonnes), based on the Daniel dreambook. In this
work he makes a specific link between dreams
and astrology, giving guidance on dreams that
might occur on each day of the lunar month and
their medical significance. He also supplies an
alphabetical list of 277 objects that might appear
in dreams, giving their significance. Some prefig-
ure Panurge’s concerns about marriage: thus
“Marrying a woman means trouble” (“Espouser
une femme signifie dommage”); “Engag-

ing in conjugal acts with one’s wife spells dan-
ger” (“Faire l’œuvre de mariage avec sa femme
signifie peril et danger de sa personne”); advice
is also given on the unfavorable significance of
dreaming about horns or birds or musical instru-
ments.
Treatises and manuals on dreams appeared
throughout the sixteenth century, and Rabelais
had read studies by Ficino, Vivès, Agrippa and
Scaliger, who provide him with some of the er-
udition of these chapters. His ideas are close to
those of another medical contemporary and royal
doctor, Auger Ferrier, whose treatise appeared in
1549. The underlying principle is drawn from
Neoplatonic sources, namely, that during sleep
the soul or spirits of the body, no longer required
to sustain bodily functions, were free to leave
and to rejoin the spirit world: “Nostre ame . . .
s’esbat et reveoit sa patrie, qui est le ciel” (3BK
13). Dreams were revered because they were
thought to contain vague, half-remembered im-
pressions from this night journey of the soul, in-
cluding material about the future.
Some of the debate in these chapters turns on
commonplace medical advice on how to prevent
the body, through disturbances like indigestion,
from interfering with the free movement of the
spirits. Pantagruel makes appropriate recommen-
dations about Panurge’s diet before sleeping.
Other topics include rejection of magical rituals
associated in antiquity with oniromancy, such as
that of placing under the pillow certain leaves or
precious stones, or even “the left shoulder of the
crocodile and chameleon” (“l’espaule guausche
du crocodile et du chameleon”). The major
theme, however, is the uncertainty of dreams, as
expressed in the image found in Homer and Vir-
gil of the two gates of ivory and horn. The Rab-
elaisian episode seeks to distinguish between nat-
ural dreams, which inform the doctor about his
patient’s health, dreams of divine inspiration, by
which God sends us warning, and finally dreams
of diabolical origin, by which Satan cunningly
seeks to deceive us. Despite this uncertainty,
which Panurge seeks to exploit ingeniously in his
own favorable interpretation, Pantagruel is given
the last word with his confident and amply illus-
trated reading of the dream as inauspicious and
as prophesying cuckoldry.
The title of Habert’s poem, and no doubt the
Du Bellay, Guillaume 59
increasingly bizarre, nightmarish nature of epi-
sodes in the Fourth Book and Fifth Book, gave
yet another imitator the idea for a posthumous
pseudo-rabelaisian work, the Songes drolatiques
de Pantagruel (1565). This collection of wood-
cuts derived from Bosch and Breughel illustrat-
ing monstrous figures has become associated
with Rabelais in many subsequent editions.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, “Rabelais et les son-
ges,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des étu-
des françaises 30 (1978): 7–21; François Berriot, ed.,
Exposicions et significacions des songes (Geneva:
Droz, 1989); F. Berriot, ed., “A propos des chapitres
XIII et XIV du Tiers Livre,” RHR 23 (1986): 5–14;
Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz,
1977); Richard A. Cooper, “Deux médecins royaux
onirocrites: Jean Thibault et Auger Ferrier,” Le Songe
à la Renaissance, ed. Françoise Charpentier (St.
Etienne, 1990); Richard A. Cooper, “Bibliographie
sommaire d’ouvrages sur le Songe publiés en France
et en Italie jusqu’en 1600,” Le Songe: 255–71; Norma
L. Goodrich, “The Dream of Panurge,” ER (Geneva:
Droz, 1967): 94–103.
Richard Cooper
DU BELLAY, GUILLAUME (1491–1543) A
French diplomat and long-standing patron,
friend, and protector of Rabelais. The first offi-
cial record of a meeting between the two men
dates from 1534, the year in which Rabelais ac-
companied Guillaume’s brother Jean to Italy.
Even before that, however, the future physician
and author may well have met and formed a
friendship with the wealthy and well-educated du
Bellay brothers, who according to tradition were
educated at the monastery of La Baumette—the
same cloister where Rabelais himself is reputed
to have taken his priestly vows sometime after
1510. Although du Bellay, unlike Rabelais, did
not become a monk or enter the priesthood, he
himself was a minor writer, a humanist, a staunch
supporter of the French king, and a voice of com-
promise and moderation in debates between Re-
formist and Catholic factions during the 1520s
and 1530s. During his illustrious career Guil-
laume du Bellay, Sieur de Langey, was repeat-
edly involved in negotiations between Francis I
and Charles V, facilitated the divorce of Henry
VIII by enlisting the support of France, and
served as governor of Turin (1537–39) and Pied-
60 Du Bellay, Jean
mont (1539–42). During Langey’s term of office
in Piedmont, Rabelais accompanied his patron
and served him in the capacity of secretary and
naturalist, returning with him to France late in
1542. Du Bellay’s death in early 1543 had a so-
bering effect on the Gallic physician, who incor-
porates the event into his meditation on the
Death of Heroes (4BK 26–27) in the Fourth
Book.
Readings: V.-L. Bourrilly, Guillaume du Bellay,
seigneur de Langey, 1491–1593 (Paris: Société nou-
velle de librairie et d’édition, 1905); Michael A.
Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
DU BELLAY, JEAN (1493–1560) French hu-
manist, diplomat, and powerful prelate who, like
his brother Guillaume, was a friend and patron
of Rabelais. The earliest documented interaction
between the author and Jean du Bellay dates
from 1534, when the physician accompanied his
fellow clergyman, then bishop of Paris and suf-
fering from sciatica, to Rome. Upon his return to
France later the same year, Rabelais dedicated
his edition of Marliani’s Topography of Ancient
Rome to Jean du Bellay, whose patronage both
helped shield the writer against attacks from the
Sorbonne and likely enhanced his ability to win
the ear of powerful and aristocratic audiences. In
1535 Rabelais again accompanied Jean du Bellay
to Rome, this time for the bishop’s investiture as
cardinal; and the author joined the cleric there
again in 1547, when du Bellay was dispatched to
supervise the French cardinals in Rome follow-
ing the death of Francis I and the accession of
Henry II. Some scholars even suggest that Ra-
belais’s stay in Metz during 1546–47, long
viewed as a period of exile following the publi-
cation of his controversial Third Book, was in
reality a mission for the cardinal, while others
hypothesize that the du Bellay family, which had
connections in Metz, arranged the visit to protect
Rabelais from his detractors. What is certain is
that du Bellay was one of the more colorful and
powerful figures of the French Renaissance. De-
spite his powerful position within the Church,
which garnered him several votes for the papacy
upon the death of Paul III, the prelate was known
as a Reform sympathizer and assisted his brother
Guillaume in negotiations with the German Prot-
estants during the 1530s. In addition to being a
diplomat and prelate, Jean du Bellay like many
other humanists was a writer as well, whose lit-
erary output includes Latin verse, printed with
Salmon Macrin’s Odes in 1546, and a collection
of lively (but mostly unpublished) correspon-
dence.
Readings: Richard Cooper, “Les poésies de jeu-
nesse de Jean du Bellay,” Mélanges offerts à Guy De-
merson, ed. Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand (Paris:
Champion, 1993) 97–111; Donald Frame, Rabelais
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); “Jean
du Bellay,” The 1911 Edition Encyclopedia, http://
www.1911encyclopedia.org / D / DU / DU_BELLAY_
JEAN.htm; Remy Scheurer, Correspondance du car-
dinal Jean du Bellay. Tome II: 1535–1536 (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1973); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais
(London: Duckworth, 1979).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
 E
ECOLIER LIMOUSIN (LIMOUSIN
SCHOOLBOY) (P 6) A university student
traveling from Paris to Limoges whom Panta-
gruel encounters outside the gates of Orléans.
The Limousin student speaks what the chapter
heading identifies as counterfeit French by in-
serting Latin words with French endings into ver-
nacular syntax in order, as he claims, to enrich
the French language, or “le locupleter de la re-
dundance latinicome.” In fact, posterity has in
part vindicated his efforts since many of his un-
usual words have since entered standard French
usage, rendering his speech less strange than it
would have been to Rabelais’s first readers. In
the story, Pantagruel punishes the Ecolier for his
pretentious speech, causing him to revert to his
native Limousin dialect. The episode ends with
a resounding victory for common usage rein-
forced by an appeal to Julius Caesar’s condem-
nation of archaic diction recorded in Aulus Gel-
lius’s Noctes Atticae.
The encounter between Pantagruel and the
Limousin scholar has provoked a great deal of
commentary, some of it indignant and some in-
terpretive. The first critic to respond to the epi-
sode was Etienne Pasquier in a letter addressed
to Claude de Kerquefinen dated circa 1560,
where Pasquier identifies the Ecolier as a parody
of Hélisenne de Crenne, author of the novel Les
angoysses douloureuses d’amour. Pasquier initi-
ated a common theme of Rabelais criticism when
he labeled the Ecolier’s language “un langage
escorche-latin,” or skinned Latin. Subsequent
critics have pointed out that one of the first
phrases pronounced by the Limousin replicates a
phrase from the preface to Geoffroy Tory’s
Champ fleury where the author deplores certain
linguistic abuses, including those perpetrated by
the “Escumeurs de Latin.” Criticism has identi-
fied numerous other references to the skimmer or
skinner of Latin in middle French literature, sug-
gesting that Rabelais’s episode participates in a
widespread genre of linguistic satire.
The episode, like others from Pantagruel, also
participates in a debate on natural language.
When the Ecolier reverts from his hybrid uni-
versity jargon to his native dialect, Pantagruel,
whose violence has induced this change, con-
gratulates him for speaking naturally, though his
speech is equally strange in both instances. By
juxtaposing a regional dialect with a national lan-
guage and a professional jargon, this chapter
seems to relativize the notion of natural language
and to substitute for it an ideal of national usage,
somewhat like chapter 9 where Panurge speaks
in various languages before making himself un-
derstood in French.
One way to deepen our understanding of the
Ecolier Limousin is to examine his strange Lat-
inate diction more closely and to attempt to iden-
tify its literary antecedents. The Ecolier employs
a variety of Latinate forms, including the prefixes
sub, omni, and super, the suffixes bond, come,
ose, and ique, and superlatives in issime. How-
ever, by far the most distinctive lexical feature
of the Ecolier’s speech is his insistent use of the
Latin diminutive endings ulus or culus. He uses
no fewer than thirteen of these diminutives in the
course of the chapter, including eleven nouns and
two adjectives. The same diminutive form recurs
constantly in the hybrid prose of Francesco Co-
lonna, arranged in the most impossible combi-
nations with other ostentatious Latinisms. Thus,
when the Ecolier admires “ces meritricules ami-
cabilissimes,” we can detect an unmistakable
echo of the Hypnerotomachia. At the same time,
according to Jacques Chomarat and others, the
diminutive form ulus is one of the most distinc-
tive features of Erasmus’s prose style, deriving
most likely from the influence of Lorenzo Valla’s
62 Economy, in Renaissance France
Elegantiae. In this way, when he imagines the
extravagant speech of his Limousin scholar, Ra-
belais offers us not so much a moral satire as a
verbal experiment, what Raymond Queneau
called an exercise of style, following in the tra-
dition of some of the most original prose writers
of the European Renaissance.
Readings: Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhéto-
rique chez Erasme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980);
Gérard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Georges Gougenheim, “La re-
latinisation du vocabulaire français,” Annales de
l’Université de Paris 29 (1959): 5–18; Etienne Pas-
quier, Choix de lettres sur la littérature, la langue et
la traduction (Geneva: Droz, 1956).
Eric MacPhail
ECONOMY, IN RENAISSANCE FRANCE
The Renaissance enjoyed a period of economic
growth without precedent in history. It was the
age of the Fugger and the Medici, two families
who grew rich through commerce and controlled
the banking system in important marketplaces
such as Lyon and Antwerp. During the sixteenth
century, the internationalization of capital was
not only a European phenomenon but also a
world reality. The “discovery” of the New World
and the creation of trading posts in the Orient
enabled commercial capital to acquire a global
dimension. The circulation of goods intensified
within a continually expanding market that
crossed political and cultural boundaries. The
new breed of merchant travelers, like Dinden-
ault, adapted to cultural differences with relative
ease. Business was in general free of prejudices,
and the bourgeoisie accepted diverse mores and
customs as long as they did not interfere with its
primary economic activity. A product of this new
cultural logic was a utilitarian vision of the world
that promoted the free circulation of individuals
throughout the world. In many respects, it resem-
bled what we would in modern terms call “free
trade.”
The very notion of work was also redefined in
the Renaissance. Indeed, the social and eco-
nomic reality of the time placed labor and pro-
duction at the heart of all human activities. Work
became so prevalent in defining the individual
that it invaded all spheres of human endeavors,
including literary and artistic production. Society
itself was often understood in terms of one’s re-
lationship to the prevailing mode of production.
Hence, the Renaissance defined society (at least
its productive part) in three distinct categories,
each related to its respective economic function:
laborers, craftsmen, and merchants. The negative
image of merchants during the Middle Ages was
rapidly changing. The secular became irremedi-
ably separated from the sacred, and work increas-
ingly preoccupied the centralized state. Images
and metaphors based on production, exchange,
and accumulation abound during the Renais-
sance. Economic terms found their way into the
literary works of the time, especially Rabelais.
The novelty is that this lexicon defined social
relations as well. Once freed from religious con-
siderations, economic discourse shaped and re-
defined the linguistic practices of everyday life.
The historian Fernand Braudel defined the
Renaissance as a time of economic exchange, but
it was also a time of monetary change. The di-
versity of currencies (coins) that circulated
throughout Europe required a stable system of
exchange to facilitate commerce. In his Treatise
of Merchandise and the Perfect Merchant, Be-
nedetto Cotrugli spoke of currency exchange as
the essential seasoning for all sorts of commerce.
New practices started to appear on markets (dry
change, manual change, letters of exchange,
etc.), and the Italian merchant-bankers intro-
duced new accounting techniques in France. The
iconography of the Renaissance provides numer-
ous images of merchants and bankers involved
in changing or weighing golden and silver coins.
Once again, literature offers us a good under-
standing of the importance of changing money
in the Renaissance. Panurge, for example, was
an expert in the art of changing coins for profit.
Money rapidly became the social sign par excel-
lence, providing the measure of success or failure
in any number of human endeavors.
If one cannot, per se, speak of political econ-
omy during the Renaissance (Montchrestien will
coin the term in the early seventeenth century),
we can nonetheless assert that economic consid-
erations increasingly occupied a central place in
moral, social, and even religious matters during
the Renaissance. Inflation, lending, debts, usury,
hoarding and the building up of capital, market
protections, and the like, generated numerous

discussions which transcended their immediate
economic reality. Once more, Rabelais offers his
own comic reflection on these problems (see, for
example, the famous Praise of Debts, or the ep-
isode of the Chats-fourréz in the Fifth Book).
Despite the rapid expansion of markets, one
must also recognize that, for most sixteenth-
century people, the region remained the imme-
diate environment for daily life and work. For
the vast majority of the population, the provincial
and local markets represented the world. Unlike
merchants, laborers and craftsmen depended on
local markets for their economic well-being. At
this level, innovations multiplied as local travel
became easier. The improvement of roads and
rivers facilitated the distribution of goods and ac-
celerated the circulation of foodstuffs. The pe-
riod’s literature exploited images of local peas-
ants en route to market. The city was rapidly
becoming the center of all economic activities.
The episode of the fouaciers or bakers in Gar-
gantua provides a glimpse of this new reality,
where even war is sparked by a breakdown in
regional commerce.
Readings: Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Cap-
italism, 15th–18th century, 3 vols. (New York: Harper
& Row, 1982–84); Philippe Desan, L’imaginaire
économique de la Renaissance (Paris: Presses de
l’Université de Paris IV—Sorbonne, 2002); Immanuel
Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-
Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1974).
Philippe Desan
EDUCATION A central theme of Rabelais’s
mock epic and of numerous other Renaissance
works. The intellectual ferment of the restitutio
litterae, which took hold in Italy in the late four-
teenth century and swept northward during the
next two hundred years, brought with it a reas-
sessment of the medieval cursus studiorum and
an outpouring of alternative educational models,
including The Education of the Gentleman (c.
1404) by Vergerius, The Education of a Chris-
tian Prince (1516) by Erasmus, and On the
Transmission of Knowledge (1531) by Juan Luis
Vives. Inspired in part by humanistic pedagogi-
cal models of this type, which advocate time-
efficient, stimulating methods of teaching and a
Education 63
wide-ranging curriculum based mainly on texts
from antiquity, Rabelais’s treatment of education
is also informed by the birth/education/prowess
format of fifteenth-century chivalric tales, by the
educational thrust of the epic and of initiatory
myths in general, and by the heated confrontation
in early sixteenth-century France between the
New Learning and the scholastic canon.
While the theme of education subtends all five
Books of Pantagruel, it is in the letter on learning
from Gargantua to Pantagruel (P 8) and in the
six chapters chronicling Gargantua’s own edu-
cation (G 14–15, 21–24) that Rabelais confronts
pedagogical issues most directly. In the famous
letter, which like Alberti’s Book of the Family
links the young gentleman’s learning to the glory
of his family and the progress of humankind,
Gargantua exhorts his son to become an “abyss
of knowledge,” a Gallic version of Italy’s Ren-
aissance Man or uomo universale. Borrowing
language that dates back to Petrarch, the Uto-
pian king decries the “darkness” of medieval
pedagogy, which he mocks elsewhere for its rote
repetition and intellectual closure, and extols the
“light” of classically inspired studies. The am-
bitious course of studies Gargantua lays out for
his son modifies and expands the medieval Triv-
ium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) to include the
languages of humanistic scholarship (classical
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean),
Greek and Roman rhetorical models (Plato and
Cicero), and history, a shibboleth of humanistic
curricula. In addition to covering the Quadrivium
(geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy),
which Pantagruel begins at the age of five or six,
Gargantua rounds out his humanistic curriculum
with civil law (in opposition to the canon law
typically taught in French universities), the nat-
ural sciences, and medicine; advocates the study
of biblical texts in the original Greek and He-
brew; and, in typical Renaissance fashion,
stresses the importance of both military training
and morality. The letter’s apparent value as an
educational model is strengthened by the rollick-
ing satire of the scholastic antimodel—its logic,
rhetoric, institutions, and scholarly writings—in
adjacent episodes and by the typically humanistic
chronology and interpersonal dynamics of the
curriculum that Gargantua outlines.
Although Pantagruel’s first teacher is his fa-
64 Emblems
ther, the archetype of authority and tradition,
Gargantua chooses to instill in his young son a
“taste” for mathematics and music rather than
force-feeding him, thereby awakening in Panta-
gruel an appetite for knowledge and preparing
the prince to become an active agent in his own
education. To be sure, Gargantua advocates ex-
tensive memorization, which might seem at first
to align the king with his own scholastic tutors
(G 14–15). If the humanists frequently scoff at
the medieval penchant for “memorizing by rote,”
however, proto-Renaissance theorists such as
Manetti (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man
[De dignitate et excellentia hominis], 1396)
nonetheless embrace memory itself as a sine qua
non of man’s dignity and ability to progress. Far
from proposing a methodology based solely on
memorization, moreover, the king engages a hu-
manistic tutor (Epistémon) for his son to emu-
late and converse with; emphasizes the impor-
tance of observation, discussion, and judgment;
and addresses the imperative for doing as well as
learning.
In his Gargantua, written two years later, Ra-
belais adds painting, sculpture, physical educa-
tion, and even the study of industry and tech-
nology to his giant’s curriculum, which is
remarkable for its innovative methods as well as
its ambitious content. In contrast to the scholastic
system of Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bridé (G
14–15), which is so boring and repetitive that it
causes young Gargantua to regress, the time-
efficient and interactive curriculum designed by
Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor who replaces the
theologians, actively seeks to engage the stu-
dent’s interest and intellect. Lively discussions,
first-hand observations, and hands-on experience
supplement traditional book learning, and instead
of being restricted to a stationary classroom or
chapel, young Gargantua is taught in different
rooms of the castle and makes field trips to a
plethora of sites.
Because Rabelais’s treatment of education is
interwoven into a mock-epic framework, some
scholars contend that his fictional curricula, and
particularly the letter on learning, function more
as satires of scholastic encyclopedism or as par-
odies of humanistic hubris than as either serious
pedagogical models or tributes to the New Learn-
ing. Although not universally accepted, this cau-
tionary reading finds partial support in the more
overtly skeptical Third and Fourth Books, which
explore alternate sources of information (inter-
views with learned men, forays into the occult,
geographical exploration), the gap between learn-
ing and doing, the value of self-knowledge, and
the problematic nature of truth in a pluralistic
world (see also Humanism; Scholasticism).
Readings: Gerard J. Brault, “ ‘Ung abysme de sci-
ence’: On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to
Pantagruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Gérard Defaux,
Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire
de l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Medieval Cur-
riculum, The Scholastic University, and Gargantua’s
Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabelais’s In-
comparable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum,
1986); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais
Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
EMBLEMS Pantagruel, published in 1531 or
1532, appeared at about the same time as the first
book of emblems, the Emblematum libellus of
Andrea Alciato. This emblem book was pub-
lished in Augsburg in 1531 and in Paris in 1534
by Chrétien Wechel, with each of the 113 Latin
emblems accompanied by a complementary
woodcut in Wechel’s edition. Several other Par-
isian editions quickly followed, including a
French translation by Jean Lefevre. An emblem
book, properly speaking, should have a tripartite
structure like that of Alciato’s book, with each
entry consisting of a picture, motto, and short
text (either poetry or prose). The texts often re-
sembled those in books of proverbs. The picture
is not exactly an illustration, and the motto is not
exactly a caption. In a true emblem book, the
parts together express an abstract, moral, or spir-
itual truth, and the reader must participate in de-
ciphering the meaning suggested by each em-
blem. There were also books of personal or
heraldic devices (imprese in Italian) with mot-
toes, often with symbolic content. Gargantua’s
hat medallion was such a device (G 8).
Between the first publication of Pantagruel
and the publication of the expanded version of
the Fourth Book in 1552, several emblem books

appeared in France. The popularity of emblem
books may have contributed to the appeal of Ra-
belais’s works, and vice versa. Among contem-
porary emblematic publications were the Theatre
of Virtuous Devices (Theatre des bons engines)
by Guillaume de La Perrière and the Hecatom-
graphie of Gilles Corrozet, both published in
1540 in Paris by Denis Janot. This same pub-
lisher had produced Les cronicques du roy Gar-
gantua et qui fut son pere et sa mere (c. 1532),
as well as The Disciple of Pantagruel (Le disci-
ple de Pantagruel [c. 1538?]), each with a full-
page woodcut illustration on the title page. The
Cronicques featured David and Goliath with an
army of soldiers with spears behind the two main
figures, and the second work (usually referred to
as the Navigation) depicted a gigantic Pantagruel
holding the Divine Bottle. Other books by Ra-
belais were published in Lyon, a hotbed of Al-
ciato publishing by Bonhomme and Rouille be-
tween 1548 and 1552. Sebastian Gryphius in
Lyon issued several works edited by Rabelais,
including texts relating to medicine in the early
1540s. During this same period, Gryphius pub-
lished a textual edition of Horapollo’s Hiero-
glyphics (Hieroglyphica), which was followed by
illustrated editions in Paris. Renaissance scholars
thought that Horapollo’s symbols contained an-
cient, pristine wisdom; this “essence” of truth is
a recurring theme in Rabelais’s opus.
Although Gargantua includes satirical treat-
ment of both heraldic devices and emblems, il-
lustrated editions of this text present several pic-
tures that should be read emblematically. An
example is a woodcut in the Gargantua of 1547
published in Valence, in which one man points
another toward the entrance to the Abbey of
Thélème, with a poetic text below the woodcut
explaining precisely what types of people are not
permitted to enter the abbey (226). Another ex-
ample is a woodcut in the Gargantua published
in Lyon in 1542, with two women and a man
seated at a table with various objects on it. This
enigmatic picture opens the chapter of the enig-
matic prophecy (f. 151v). There are also many
thematic connections between Rabelais’s books
and subjects treated in contemporary emblem
books. Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie features sev-
eral such topics, such as an emblem “Against As-
Emblems 65
trologers” (“Contre les astrologues”) with an as-
trologer pointing to the sun, moon, and stars,
accompanied by a poetic text stating that it is not
for us to know the secrets of the heavens, but for
God (fK6v).
Renaissance readers approached various types
of books with text and images, such as the Hi-
eroglyphics of Horapollo, with the idea of dis-
covering arcane meanings and hidden symbol-
ism. Moreover, Renaissance books without
emblematic pictures sometimes contained em-
blematic structure, featuring descriptive visual
imagery in juxtaposition with narrative or ex-
planatory text. The combination of this imagery
and text functioned emblematically, so that read-
ers could comprehend the hidden message by
“reading between the lines.” Much of Rabelais’s
writing functions in this manner, for example, his
descriptions of the hideous Furry Cats (Chats-
fourrez) and of the glorious Androgyne. The Di-
vine Bottle was often illustrated in technopa-
egnia (the words reflecting the shape of the
object), another emblematic approach to litera-
ture. As we have come to realize, the hidden
meanings in Rabelais expressed his Evangelical
sympathies and the tenets of Renaissance Neo-
platonism. For Neoplatonism, the image was a
vital link between external reality and the essence
of truth; what we now call “applied emblemat-
ics” was one of Rabelais’s most fruitful literary
tools.
Readings: François Rigolot and Sandra Sider,
“Fonctions de l’écriture emblématique chez Rabelais,”
EC 28.2 (1988): 36–47; Daniel Russell, “A Note on
Panurge’s ‘Pusse en l’aureille’,” ER 11 (1974): 82–87;
Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New Clothes,” ER
14 (1977): 89–104; Martine Sauret, Gargantua et les
délits du corps (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Jerome
Schwartz, “Gargantua’s Device and the Abbey of Thé-
lème: A Study in Rabelais’ Iconography,” YFS 47
(1972): 232–242; Jerome Schwartz, “Scatology and
Eschatology in Gargantua’s Androgyne Device,” ER
14 (1978): 265–275; Michael Screech, “Emblems and
Colours: The Controversy over Gargantua’s Colours
and Devices (Gargantua, 8, 9, 10),” Mélanges
d’histoire du XVIe siècle: Offerts à Henri Meylan (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1970) 65–80; Sandra Sider, “Emblematic
Imagery in Rabelais,” Diss. University of North Car-
olina, 1977; Florence Weinberg, “Layers of Emblem-
66 Encyclopedism
atic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” SCJ 26.2 (1995):
367–377.
Sandra Sider
ENCYCLOPEDISM Rabelais refers twice to
the “encyclopedia,” by which he means the “cir-
cle of learning.” Thaumaste, the “great scholar”
from England, wishes to test Pantagruel’s learn-
ing but is treated instead to a disputation, in sign
language, with Pantagruel’s “disciple” Panurge,
whose obscene gestures Thaumaste interprets as
revealing the occultist knowledge transmitted by
Pantagruel: “He [Panurge] has uncovered for me
the true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia” (P
18). This term would have struck many contem-
porary readers as unfamiliar, as esoteric in itself.
It had only entered the French language some ten
years earlier, in about 1522, in one of the various
works in which Rabelais’s correspondent Guil-
laume Budé, the great humanist, meditated on
the “circle of learning” that had been called en-
kyklios paideia by the ancient Greeks, orbis doc-
trinae by the ancient Romans, and encyclopedia
by Italian humanist grammarians such as Angelo
Poliziano. This “circle” meant different things at
different times. For the ancients, it was not in the
least esoteric but instead largely denoted a cycle
of preliminary, propaedeutic instruction given to
boys in order to teach them philosophy (the
Greeks) or rhetoric (the Romans, who based this
cursus mainly on the liberal arts—see Quintil-
ian, The Orator’s Education, 1.10.1). In the late
fifteenth century, for Poliziano and others, this
“circle” was even more substantial: the encyclo-
pedia now consisted in detailed knowledge of the
extant corpus of ancient texts; that knowledge
qualified a person to practice philology. Eras-
mus put greater emphasis on study of the Bible
as the most valuable outcome of this humanist
“circle of learning.” Budé’s notion of the ency-
clopedia was influenced by both Erasmus and
Poliziano. These humanist notions of the “circle
of learning” differed from ancient ones in that
they emphasized extraordinary erudition rather
than ordinary education.
It is possible that Rabelais is imagining, in the
figure of Pantagruel, an amazing synthesis of
these twin ideals: the giant’s extraordinary eru-
dition, that so impresses Thaumaste, is the out-
come of his adolescent cursus of studies. To in-
terpret Rabelais in this way, one has to argue that
Thaumaste’s reference to the “Encyclopedia” that
Panurge has communicated to him also refers,
more implicitly, to the education received by
Pantagruel in earlier chapters. This reading is
strengthened by the verbal echo between Thau-
maste’s “abyss of the Encyclopedia” and the
“abyss of knowledge” which Gargantua urged
Pantagruel to acquire through his education (P
8). However, this high-minded reading needs to
be balanced against the fact that this alleged “En-
cyclopedia” is revealed to Thaumaste only by
Panurge’s obscene and scatological gestures.
Rabelais represents the “Encyclopedia” as in-
volving occultist knowledge in particular. Thau-
maste thinks he has been discussing with Pan-
urge not only philosophy but also magic,
alchemy, the kabbala, geomancy, and astrol-
ogy. Indeed, the only other place where Rabelais
uses the term (in a deformed version) is on the
title page of the 1544 almanac that he probably
composed, under the name of “Seraphino Cal-
basy, doctor in the most noble discipline of as-
trology and medicine of the entire Encyclope-
dia.”
Soon after Rabelais’s time, some book com-
pilations of learning began to be called encyclo-
pedias. Certain modern scholars, going beyond
actual occurrences of the term, have defined as
Renaissance encyclopedism any attempt to
shape knowledge—whether in a book or in the
learner’s mind—into an internally coherent circle
of learning, set out in a metaphysically signifi-
cant order. Renaissance encyclopedism, in its dif-
ferent varieties, differed from its modern coun-
terparts in that it did not claim exhaustiveness:
only knowledge deemed necessary was included
in the circle of learning. It was not until the En-
lightenment Encyclopédie that the modern notion
of the encyclopedia as a comprehensive, alpha-
betically arranged reference work began to be-
come dominant.
Readings: Guy Guedet, “Guillaume Budé, parrain
d’‘encyclopédie’ ou le vrai texte de l’Institution du
prince,” Le génie de la forme: Mélanges de langue et
littérature offerts à Jean Mourot (Nancy: Presses
Universitaires de Nancy, 1982); Neil Kenny, The Pal-
ace of Secrets: Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance
Conceptions of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991); Franco Simone, “La notion d’encyclopédie:

élément caractéristique de la Renaissance française,”
French Renaissance Studies, 1540–70: Humanism and
the Encyclopedia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1976).
Neil Kenny
ENGLAND Estimating Rabelais’s reception in
early modern England and Scotland is compli-
cated by the presence of a now lost chapbook,
probably called The History of Gargantua, trans-
lated from the Croniques admirables sometime
around 1567, and by the Songes drolatiques Pan-
tagruel (1565), ascribed to Rabelais on its title
page and used by Inigo Jones to help costume at
least one court antimasque. Many allusions to
Gargantua in the period must mean the chap-
book giant, even if as Rabelais became better
known some must have equated them. Other
pseudorabelaisian works had minimal impact, al-
though in 1628 the satirist and explorer Robert
Hayman translated two poems by François Ha-
bert which he thought were by Rabelais because
they were published in some editions of Rabe-
lais’s Oeuvres.
The role of Rabelais’s own works in the Eng-
lish or Scottish imagination can be traced
through borrowings (most extensively in John
Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica, 1593) and the admir-
ing or dismayed allusions that began slowly in
the later sixteenth century and increased rapidly
thereafter. Those wishing to read Rabelais would
have welcomed Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-
English dictionary, which cites him frequently
and at times imitates his style. In 1653 Thomas
Urquhart published a translation of the first two
books with a verve and imagination that have
never been surpassed. He also did a partial trans-
lation of the Third Book, and this, together with
a more subdued English version of the remaining
two books was published by the Huguenot émi-
gré Peter Motteux in 1693–94.
The list of those who quoted or alluded to Ra-
belais before he was translated is impressive. It
includes John Donne; the great antiquary John
Selden; Ben Jonson (who owned a copy of his
Oeuvres); the fiction-writer and satirist Thomas
Lodge; the court poet and dramatist James
Shirley; John Webster; Francis Bacon; the witty
translator of Ariosto, Sir John Harington; the
poet Michael Drayton; Thomas Browne; Robert
England 67
Burton; the satirist (and future bishop) John Hall;
and King James I. Many relished and sometimes
imitated his verbal inventiveness, others his fan-
tasy, and yet others his scatology or similar ges-
tures toward Carnival materialism—gestures
sometimes oversimplified or misread as the myth
of Rabelais the dirty-mouthed celebrator of drink
and sex took hold. With some exceptions, most
of those who left evidence of having read or
heard of Rabelais were from a set of overlapping
social and intellectual circles: the court, the the-
ater, and the legal world of London’s Inns of
Court. To quote or name him was, in these cir-
cles, to signal an urban(e) wit, good education,
and, sometimes, a touch of what would in France
come to be called a “libertin” attitude: skeptical,
amused, worldly.
That very tone led others, especially those of
a “Puritan” persuasion, when writing polemics or
moral treatises to cite Rabelais with dislike or
contempt and to besmirch opponents by associ-
ating them with his supposed drunkenness, athe-
ism, and ridiculous fictions. Sometimes the vil-
lain is Gargantua, who may or may not be the
Rabelaisian giant, but often he is Rabelais him-
self, the writer’s Bacchic imagery and exhorta-
tions read literally as personal alcoholism and his
Franciscan (or Humanist) anticlerical humor read
as cynical irreligion. It is this other reputation,
one that would prosper in later centuries but with
a more positive spin, that explains the occasional
ambivalence in individual English reactions to
Rabelais. Edmund Spenser’s friend Gabriel Har-
vey, to cite the clearest example, praises Rabelais
in the manuscript marginalia he scribbled in var-
ious books but denigrates him in printed attacks
on his enemy Thomas Nashe.
Did Rabelais have much influence in the Brit-
ish Isles? One can find traces of him in the writ-
ings of Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Francis
Bacon. Others, most notably Harington and the
irrepressible Thomas Nashe, may have learned
something about verbal tumble from him, about
lists or other methods of verbal proliferation,
teasing postponements, and self-reflexive narra-
tive intrusions by the author. Donne, and perhaps
others, imitated his fantasy library (P 7) or Ep-
istémon’s vision of Carnival reversal in Hades
(P 30), although it can be difficult to distinguish
his influence from that of Lucian. Largely miss-
68 Enigmatic Prophecy
ing from British understanding of Rabelais is his
evangelical seriousness on the one hand and his
more disturbing comic ironies on the other. An
exception may be Shakespeare, and there may
have been many others who did not record their
views or readily submit to “influence.” In any
case, Rabelais’s ambiguous image was now set,
and his fame and influence after Urquhart’s
translation only increased. In later centuries he
would find perceptive imitators in Laurence
Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Jonathan Swift (Gul-
liver’s Travels), and, less expectedly, the Victo-
rian cleric Charles Kingsley (Waterbabies). Nor
is his influence over, as witness J. K. Toole’s
Menippean Confederacy of Dunces. The word
“Rabelaisian” still modifies one sort of humor,
and a recent Japanese monster film, War of the
Gargantuas, demonstrates the globalization of
Rabelais’s most famous giant, if not of his own
Pantagruelism.
Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English
Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1933); Huntington Brown, ed., The Tale of Gargantua
and King Arthur by François Girault c. 1534 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Marcel
de Grève, “La legende de Gargantua en Angleterre au
XVIe siècle,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire
38 (1960): 765–94; Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining
Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998).
Anne Lake Prescott
ENIGMATIC PROPHECY (ÉNIGME EN
PROPHÉTIE) (G 58) Abruptly situated at the
end of Gargantua (58), this poem is immediately
followed by contradictory interpretations offered
by Gargantua and Frère Jean. With the excep-
tion of the first two and last ten verses, the poem
was formerly attributed to Mellin de Saint-
Gelais, although this conjecture has been largely
discredited. It is more likely the poem attributed
to Saint-Gelais in a 1574 edition of his works
was taken from Rabelais’s poem. The enigma
was a popular genre that consisted in elaborate
and obscure descriptions of common or obscene
things. Once the key to the enigma was discov-
ered, little critical interest remained. Frère Jean
follows this practice by explaining that this
apocalyptic-sounding poem refers to a game of
jeu de paume (see Games). However, with the
additional twelve verses not found in the Saint-
Gelais version of the poem, Pantagruel’s inter-
pretation of the enigma, as an allegory of the
suffering of evangelical Christians in France, is
also viable. Read in an evangelical context, the
double interpretation can be seen as a device to
thwart those who might attack the author’s re-
formist text by offering the anodyne interpreta-
tion of Frère Jean. However, neither interpreta-
tion is exclusive, and both offer only a partial
understanding of the text. Although both inter-
pretations are correct, both are incomplete.
Meaning is reached only through a combination
of these opposing views. Along with the Fran-
freluches antidotées chapter (G 2), this poem
helps to frame the larger work and illustrates the
complicated hermeneutics put forward in the pro-
logue. This underscores the polysemic nature of
Rabelais’s work, in which various meanings
compete and contradict one another, leaving the
reader unable to reach a complete understanding
through traditional modes of hermeneutics.
Readings: Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in
Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); M. A. Screech,
Rabelais (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979);
André Tournon, En sens agile: Les acrobaties de
l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1995).
E. Bruce Hayes
ENNASIN, OR ISLAND OF THE ALLI-
ANCES (4BK 9) An exotic escale, or port of
call, visited by Pantagruel and his company in
the Fourth Book. In the symbolic system of the
Chronicles, each of these visits holds up to scru-
tiny the institutions and attitudes of sixteenth-
century France. On Ennasin, or the Island of Al-
liances, the people have noses like the ace of
clubs; Ennasin means noseless. Their unions are
no more than wordplay. To find what this island
signifies in the economy of the voyage, three
components are necessary: the symbolism of
noses, the marriage symbol, and the context in
which the episode is to be considered.
The island is triangular. Whatever symbolic
significances the triangle may have, Rabelais
uses it here as a marker to bring into association
four episodes that on the surface are not con-
nected, inviting the reader to find what they have
in common. The topic common to all is lan-

guage. The Frozen Words adventure (4BK 55–
56) deals with the relationship between words
and ideas and features an equilateral triangle that
contains “the Manor of Truth where Words,
Ideas, Examples, and portraits of all things past
and future reside.” The three other triangular fig-
ures deal with aberrations of the relationship be-
tween words and truth. In the second prologue to
the Fourth Book, Rabelais roundly condemns the
factional disputes of idle scholars. With Priapus
as his mouthpiece, Rabelais proposes that such
disputes be extinguished on the noses of a tri-
angle of petrified quarrelling scholars. In the
Physetere episode (see Papimanes and Pap-
efigues), the monster is silenced by three jave-
lins through mouth and tongue, forming a trian-
gle and shutting off the flow of foul water—
sectarian disputes—from it.
If these two episodes deal with the distortion
of truth created by factionalism, the Ennasin mar-
riage marks a rupture between idea and word.
Marriage in the Rabelaisian allegory is the con-
secrated union of Mind and Idea (see Symbolic
System). The marriages of the Island of Ennasin
are couples of words only, without significance,
engaging neither the mind nor ideas. ENNAS is
a condensed anagram of sans sens, meaning
“senseless.”
The nose is a symbol of wisdom, of native wit;
the Allianciers have no noses, no wit. How many
empty words are being bandied about in mid-
sixteenth-century France by people with no real
understanding of the issues? Rabelais dismisses
those who speak thus as “mal plaisans” (4BK
10), or “objectionable.”
Readings: Fred W. Marshall, “Papimania, the
Blessed Isle: Rabelais’ Attitude to the Roman
Church,” AJFS 31.3 (1994): 245–58; Verdun-L. Saul-
nier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquête: Etude
sur le “Quart” et le “Cinquième” livre (Paris:
SEDES, 1982); Emile V. Telle, “L’ile des Alliances
ou l’Anti-Thélème,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; Marcel
Tetel, “Thème et structure du Quart livre,” BAARD 2
(1968): 217–19.
Fred W. Marshall
EPISTÉMON When Pantagruel first meets
Panurge in the ninth chapter of Pantagruel,
Panurge speaks several real and imaginary lan-
guages. At first, Epistémon does not even rec-
Epistémon 69
ognize the specific languages that Panurge is
speaking, but when Panurge speaks Hebrew, Ep-
istémon understands and even compliments Pan-
urge on his correct Hebrew pronunciation. In
chapter 24, Epistémon once again demonstrates
his command of Hebrew by translating the He-
brew words “Lamah hazabthani,” which Christ
says to his Father on the cross, as “Why have
you abandoned me?” This is, of course, a quo-
tation from the Gospel according to Saint Mat-
thew 27.46. Epistémon’s knowledge of Hebrew
enables him to read the Old Testament in the
original version, and for this reason his under-
standing of the Old Testament has not been dis-
torted by inaccurate translations. Gargantua had,
in fact, developed a very similar argument in P
8 when he told his son that the two most impor-
tant languages for a learned Christian were He-
brew and Greek because the Old Testament was
written in Hebrew and the New Testament in
Greek.
Epistémon is not just a biblical scholar. He
combines very nicely an active life with his
scholarly pursuits. During the storm sequence in
the Fourth Book (18–22), he joins all his com-
panions, with the noticeable exception of the
hypocrite Panurge, in working very hard to save
the lives of all the crew and passengers. In Pan-
tagruel, he also participates in the war against
the Dipsodes and he even loses his head in battle,
but Panurge very kindly sews his head back on.
Once he begins breathing again, Epistémon tells
his friends what he saw in the other life. All is
reversed there. Those who were virtuous but
poor in this life now can eat as much as they
want, but those who abused their power on earth
must now pay for their sins. Epistémon indicates
that those who sold indulgences suffer for eter-
nity in Hell because they had shown contempt
for Christianity by claiming that people could
buy their way out of Purgatory. Protestant re-
formers such as Martin Luther had condemned
the sale of indulgences as an abomination. Those
who sell indulgences grant to themselves a power
that belongs to God alone. Many contemporary
Catholic thinkers including Erasmus, whom Ra-
belais greatly admired, agreed with Luther that
selling indulgences was incompatible with Chris-
tianity.
It should be noted that Rabelais places in Hell
70 Erasmus, Desiderius
those who sell indulgences, and this is the same
mortal sin committed by Panurge. Through his
fictional character Epistémon, Rabelais illustrates
how a learned and sincere Christian can reconcile
his intellectual commitment to Christianity with
the practice of his faith. Rabelais contrasts the
morally admirable Epistémon with the amoral
Panurge, and this serves to discredit Panurge in
the minds of Rabelais’s readers.
Readings: Donald M. Frame, François Rabelais: A
Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977);
Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1979).
Edmund J. Campion
ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS (1469–1536) Ra-
belais, like many contemporary writers, profited
from the classical scholarship, reforming theol-
ogy, and satirical wit of the preeminent humanist
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the only
known letter between them, Rabelais evokes
their “old friendship,” though he also describes
Erasmus, fulsomely, as his “father and mother”
in scholarship, and seeks to impress the great
man with some shameless name-dropping. Eras-
mus’s reply (if any) has not survived, but the
influence of his writings on Rabelais is obvious.
His great compilation of ancient wisdom, the Ad-
agia, regularly augmented after its first appear-
ance in 1500, provided an immense repertoire of
proverbs and related commentary.
Most significant is Rabelais’s adaptation, in
the prologue to Gargantua, of the adage Sileni
Alcibiadis (3.3.1), which demonstrates how, like
an image of the god Silenus, Socrates’s foolish
appearance concealed his divine wisdom. Al-
though Rabelais here strips the adage of Eras-
mus’s syncretic reading (Christ is another Sile-
nus) and applies it instead to the problem of
literary exegesis, its exploration of appearance
and reality informs much of Rabelais’s theology
and satire. Another of its characteristic figures,
Diogenes the Cynic, similarly dominates the
prologue to the Third Book.
Rabelais’s exposure, in both Pantagruel and
Gargantua, of the hypocrisy and linguistic ob-
fuscation practiced by the Sorbonne theologians
echoes Erasmus’s own acrimonious disputes with
the University of Paris, not least with Noël Béda,
syndic of the Sorbonne and perhaps the model
for Janotus de Bragmardo (G 17–20). The con-
tempt for monasticism embodied in Frère Jean
and voiced by Gargantua (G 40) similarly ech-
oes Erasmus’s excoriation of empty vows and
ostentatious formalism. Both writers had taken
the difficult path of escape from the cloister and
reentry to the secular world. The practical piety
of Erasmus’s philosophia Christi, embodied in
his Enchiridion (1503), finds its place in the ed-
ucational programs of Rabelais’s first two books,
while Erasmus’s innovative pedagogical meth-
ods, based on freedom and pleasure in learning,
are more distantly echoed in Ponocrates’s pro-
gram for Gargantua (G 23).
Rabelais’s Christianity, with its rejection of
scholastic formalism and its recourse to the re-
vealed word of God in the scriptures, also reflects
the evangelism formulated in France, following
Erasmus’s lead, by Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples
(possibly the inspiration for Hippothadée in
3BK 30) and Guillaume Briçonnet. Erasmus’s
ethical humanism, expounded in the Education
of a Christian Prince (1516), influences Rabe-
lais’s prescriptions for monarchy in Gargantua,
where he quotes almost verbatim Erasmus’s con-
demnation of war, “which must never be under-
taken until everything else has been tried” (cf. G
28), and shares his distaste for crusading (see G
33 and also P 29).
Erasmus’s most famous work, The Praise of
Folly (1511), revived the techniques of Lucianic
satire, including that of the self-conscious nar-
rator embodied in Rabelais’s alter ego Alcofry-
bas Nasier, and highlighted the playful ambi-
guity of the fool. At the end of the Third Book
Rabelais portrays two inspired fools, Bridoye
and Triboullet, whose actions and utterances
echo the spiritual prestige associated with Eras-
mus’s Folly at the end of her speech, where the
allusions, especially to Saint Paul’s own ecstasy,
invite the reader to contemplate the supreme
folly of Christ crucified. Similarly, Pantagruel’s
identification of Panurge’s malady as philautia
(self-love; 3BK 29) echoes important moral con-
clusions in the Praise of Folly, while the latter’s
genre, mock-panegyric, is reproduced in Pan-
urge’s Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4) and in the
eulogy of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52).
Again, Rabelais’s dialogue often reproduces
the racy satirical style of Erasmus’s Colloquies

which began life, like the Adages, as a schoolboy
manual but developed into a portrait of the vices
(and occasionally the virtues) of sixteenth-
century society. The pilgrims in Gargantua (38)
and the storm episode in the Fourth Book (24)
owe much to, respectively, the colloquies Pere-
grinatio (Pilgrimage) and Naufragium (Ship-
wreck). Rabelais’s debt to Erasmus is thus
immense, but in one passage he appears, unex-
pectedly, to mock his mentor, describing the et-
ymologist of bellum (presumably a reference to
Erasmus’s adage Dulce bellum inexpertis [4.1.1])
as “a patcher-up of old rusty Latin” (3BK prol.).
A rare moment of ingratitude!
Readings: Edmund J. Campion, Montaigne, Rabe-
lais, and Marot as Readers of Erasmus (New York:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); Erasmus, The Collected
Works of Erasmus, vol. 27 (Praise of Folly, Education
of a Christian Prince), 31–36 (Adages), 39–40
(Colloquies) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1976–); Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus,
Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1963); Jean-Claude Margolin, “Rire
avec Erasme, à l’ombre de Rabelais,” ER 33 (1998):
9–29; Michael A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of
Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980).
Michael J. Heath
EUDÉMON From the Greek endaiÓmvnÓ
(“happy, prosperous, blissful”), Eudémon first
appears in Gargantua 15, after which he is only
mentioned sporadically. In reaction to Grandg-
ousier’s dismay at his son’s educational regress,
Philippe des Marays volunteers to demonstrate
the difference between the outdated knowledge
and teaching methods of medieval scholasticism,
dispensed by Gargantua’s past and current pre-
ceptors, Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bridé, and
modern pedagogy and learning, incarnated by his
page Eudémon and his preceptor Ponocrates. It
has been widely acknowledged that the page
closely follows the model of the Aphthonian
speech of praise, a rhetorical exercise favored by
Erasmus, whose name is a near-perfect anagram
of Eudémon’s master’s, Des Marays. The influ-
ence of Melanchthon’s treatises on rhetoric and
dialectic on this new model, bent on reviving the
ancient ideal, should not be neglected, however.
The German humanist was held in high esteem
by the du Bellay family. Eudémon’s speech is
Eulogy, Satirical 71
part of the oratorical contest between him and
Gargantua and ends up proving the vast superi-
ority of the modern method. Gargantua’s infan-
tile response to his twelve-year-old opponent un-
derlines the giant’s embarrassing defeat: he cries,
hides his face, and will not utter a word.
Even though Eudémon’s praise is artificial and
exaggerated, it is not primarily meant to flatter a
powerful prince. Rather, it is a practical appli-
cation of the educational method promoted in
Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8), in which
Gargantua praises the superiority of modern cur-
ricula and pedagogy. Moreover, the speech ac-
curately assesses Gargantua’s potential, which,
thanks to his defeat, will now be developed under
the tutelage of his new preceptor, Ponocrates.
Not merely a “defense and illustration” of mod-
ern education, Eudémon’s praise thus acts almost
like a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating a situation
that will lead to its ultimate truthfulness.
Readings: Gerard J. Brault, “The Significance of
Eudémon’s Praise of Gargantua (Rabelais, I, 15),”
KRQ 18 (1971): 307–17; Olivier Millet, Calvin et la
dynamique de la parole (Paris: Champion, 1992).
Bernd Renner
EULOGY, SATIRICAL (ÉLOGE PARA-
DOXAL) Defined as the defense of “an unex-
pected, unworthy, or indefensible object,” satiri-
cal eulogy or, as it is sometimes called, rhetorical
paradox, suited the early modern desire to use
rhetorical skills to provide an open, unfettered,
and, at times, self-critical vision of the world
(Colie 1966: 3). There were notable examples in
Synesius’s praise of baldness, Lucian’s praise of
the fly, and Ovid’s praise of the nut. In his En-
comium moriae, Erasmus used folly to explore
the concept of docta ignorantia (learned igno-
rance), a major theme of the Reform theologians
as they reflected upon the teachings of Saint
Paul and the perils of prying into areas beyond
human control.
Fond of forms that were both liberating and
self-critical, Rabelais set his considerable rhetor-
ical and linguistic skills to work to create a series
of satirical eulogies. V.-L. Saulnier has described
three types of satirical eulogies: vérité originale
or contre vérité, curiosité remarquable, and vér-
ité contre-apparence (Saulnier 1950: 91). Rabe-
lais has examples of both the first and second
72 Eulogy, Satirical
types in his work. The vérité originale or contre
vérité is founded upon the premise that the public
holds a belief and that the rhetorical paradox
aims at persuading the public to take a different
view or to call into question the accepted view.
Rabelais’s Praise of Debtors (3BK 3–4) and the
Praise of the Codpiece (3BK 8 [“How the cod-
piece is the premier piece of equipment among
people at war”]) are two examples of this type
of praise in Rabelais’s work.
The Third Book also includes an example of
the curiosité remarquable, a form that departs
from the traditional goal of paradox, persuasion,
to develop an elaborate vision of an expected cu-
riosity (Losse 1980: 68). This is the case for the
Praise of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–53). The
narrator posits a world held together by the
qualities and uses of the plant, Pantagruelion,
which bears a healthy resemblance to the
strengths and virtues of its creator and inventor,
Pantagruel, but also to hemp—a necessary ma-
terial for the expansion of world commerce and
exploration through the many uses of rope both
on land and at sea.
All three of the above satirical eulogies fall
into the category of lyrical paradoxes as defined
by Marcel Tetel, in which the end is lyricism and
verbal effusion to show off the poetic gift of the
writer rather than the attack of a social institution
or social abuse (Tetel 1964: 30). Lyrical para-
doxes are free-standing and reflect a pause in the
narration, where the reader is invited to marvel
at the eloquence of the eulogist (Tetel 71). The
detachment permits a fuller exploration of the ar-
gument, through the classical components of the
eulogy: narration, confirmation, and conclusion,
necessary in the case of contre-vérités since the
argument runs counter to accepted opinion. The
open form unattached to narrative plot allows the
eulogist to amplify through such rhetorical de-
vices as enumeration and gradation.
Quite distinct from lyrical paradox is bur-
lesque paradox, where the goal is to ridicule and
where the paradox is linked to the narrative de-
velopment and comic interaction (Losse 66; Tetel
30). Burlesque paradox has many of the elements
of farce. In Rabelais’s Fourth Book, two bur-
lesque praises come to mind. First, Dindenault’s
praise of his sheep (4BK 7) extols both the prac-
tical and mythical virtues of the sheep: the fertile
powers of the sheep’s urine and excrement along
with the quality of the heel bone, compared to
the bones used by the Emperor Augustus for
playing the game of tales (here a word play on
talon and tales). Ambiguity about the comic in-
tent is removed by the ludic juxtaposition of sca-
tology and epic comparison. However, the flow
of his praise is interrupted by the baser vocabu-
lary used by Panurge and his companions. The
praise ends with Panurge throwing one of the
prized sheep into the sea and the consequent
drowning of the other sheep, as they follow the
first overboard. In a vain effort to stop the mass
drowning of sheep, Dindenault takes hold of one
and is carried overboard by the powerful sheep.
It seems a fitting end to the boastful rhetoric of
the merchant.
In Homenaz’s praise of the Decretals (4BK
51–53), Rabelais intensifies his satire by paro-
dying the elevated, inflated style of the Church
and using the tools of epideictic rhetoric: enu-
meration, gradation, and alliteration. As in the
earlier lyrical Praise of Debts or of the Panta-
gruelion, Homenaz posits the benefits to world
order brought by “ces sacrosainctes Decretales.”
However, the virtues are not based on universal
charity and love, for those who are judged
heretics will not receive their beneficial effects:
“You feel the blazing fire of divine love in your
heart aflame with charity toward your neighbor,
as long as he is not a heretic” (“Vous sentez en
vos coeurs enflammée la fournaise d’amour di-
vin, de charité envers vostre prochain, pourveu
qu’il ne soit Hereticque” [4BK 51]). Explicit
within the satirical eulogy itself is the contradic-
tion of Catholic orthodoxy—the violence await-
ing those who arouse papal ire. Caritas is not
based on unconditional love but on the strict ob-
servance of church law as interpreted by those
who are supposed to be the guardians of the
faithful (Losse 85). The second part of Hom-
enaz’s praise is appropriated by Panurge and his
friends, who recount the horrors of those who put
the sacred Decretals to more practical use: toilet
paper, sewing patterns, target practice. As in the
praise of Dindenault’s sheep, the comic juxta-
position of inflated rhetorical style and everyday,
often scatalogical language, serves to highlight
the unequivocal satirical intent of the text.
Readings: Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica.
The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1966); Deborah N. Losse,

Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy
(Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1980); Verdun-L.
Saulnier, “Proverbe et paradoxe du XVe au XVIe
siècle,” Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne aux
XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: Centre National de la Re-
cherche Scientifique, 1950); Marcel Tetel, Étude sur
le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,
1964).
Deborah Nichols Losse
EVANGELISM An early sixteenth-century,
principally French, movement among scholars,
humanists, theologians, and the laity to reform
Church practices by emphasizing the study and
the practice of the Evangile, or Gospel books of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Initially indis-
tinguishable from the Protestant Reformation,
the evangelical movement distinguished itself by
its confidence in human nature when inspired by
faith and charity. Evangelical doctrine is most
closely linked with the teachings of Saint Paul.
The writings of Rabelais, Erasmus, Thomas
More, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Na-
varre, and Clément Marot reveal an evangelical
sensibility.
Imbued with references to Holy Scripture as
well as Greco-Latin erudition, Rabelais’s literary
works frequently allude to religious issues of the
day. Rabelais’s giant protagonists, Gargantua
and Pantagruel, incarnate his own brand of
evangelism. Gargantua’s eloquent letter of advice
and encouragement to his adolescent son Panta-
gruel, with its emphasis on the perfectibility of
man’s intellect, is a prescripton for evangelical
humanism. He urges him to become an “abyss
of knowledge” in science, classical languages,
and all the arts but concludes that “knowledge
without conscience is but the ruin of the soul and
thus you must serve, love and fear God . . . this
life is transitory but the Word of the Lord en-
dures forever” (P 8). Gargantua’s own initial tu-
tor, Thubal Holoferne, evokes laughter as well as
disgust with his mania for the mindless recitation
of secondary devotional texts backwards and for-
wards. He represents the meaningless religious
education that Rabelais abhorred. Knowledge of
God is not only possible but the only noble aim
for all people. This point is underscored in the
Third Book (1546) by one of Rabelais’s few
wise theologians, Hippothadée, who insists that
God has made Himself and His desires known to
Evangelism 73
humans by describing them clearly in the Gos-
pels (3BK 30).
As a satirist, Rabelais comically targeted what
he perceived as inauthentic Christian positions by
Catholics and Protestants alike. Consequently,
commentators on both sides castigated him
equally. At the request of Catholic theologians, all
four Pantagrueline chronicles were censured by
either the Sorbonne, Parlement, or both. By
1549, Rabelais himself was commonly seen as a
threat to faith in general. In that year, the Catholic
Gabriel du Puy Herbault claimed that Rabelais
vomited a poison that infected everywhere bit by
bit, while six years later John Calvin compared
him to an enraged dog spewing its filth counter to
God’s majesty. Charges of atheism were common
but are easily belied by the strong declarations of
God’s power throughout his works.
With the 1552 publication of his final work,
the Fourth Book, for which he had received a
protective Privilège du Roy, Rabelais expanded
his caricatures of religious leaders of all stripes.
Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles are mon-
strous representations of adherents to Protestant-
ism, while the Papefigues and Papimanes, in-
habitants of two warring islands, symbolize
Reformers and apologists of the Pope (4BK 45–
54). Interestingly, Pantagruel donates generously
to this latter pair of islanders, treating both
groups evenhandedly and with muted criticism.
Throughout his books Rabelais targets the in-
terpreters of Christian doctrine rather than the
doctrines themselves. For instance, his works
rarely allude either to the sacraments of the
Church or to the Virgin Mary. However, Rabe-
lais does consistently ridicule rote devotional
practices and misplaced mechanical prayer to the
saints. Pilgrims are targeted in Gargantua when
they so timorously refuse to acknowledge them-
selves that Gargantua plucks them with his let-
tuce and starts to chew them up with his salad
(G 38). His father Grandgousier later admon-
ishes pilgrims hoping to avoid the plague by
making an offering to Saint Sebastian. His judg-
ment is harsh, claiming that Church leaders who
advocate pilgrimage as a means of forestalling
calamity blaspheme the just and saintly by re-
ducing them to mere devils who only make trou-
ble for humans. He advises the pilgrims not to
undertake useless trips and, rather, to stay home,
work, and take care of their families and to live
74 Evangelism
as “the good apostle Saint Paul taught you,” an
allusion to Ephesians 4–5 (G 45).
Rabelais plumbs medieval anticlerical satire,
such as seen in Dante, for further sources of hu-
mor. Gargantua explains that monks are the out-
casts of the world because of their inaction:
“They do not work as do the peasants, do not
defend the country as do soldiers, do not heal the
sick as do doctors, not preach or teach as do
Evangelical doctors, do not import goods as do
merchants . . . therefore they are . . . hated and
abhorred.” Worse, their prayers are useless as
they “say many paternosters, interlarded with
‘Hail Mary,’ without reflecting on or understand-
ing the meaning of what they say, which truly I
call mocking of God” (G 40). His good friend
Frère Jean is the exception for he is “neither
bigot nor hypocrite” and is constantly active,
helping others. The monk’s Abbey of Thélème,
best known for its motto “Do as you will,” is
often cited as Rabelais’s take on the highly con-
tentious issue of free will in his day (see Grace
and Free Will). This free will is at the root of
Thélème’s success, but it is a free will that must
be well disciplined and educated. Only then will
“people have an instinct, a compass called honor
which prods them to act virtuously and which
distances them from vice” (G 57). This optimistic
view of human nature, one saved by grace where
reason is formed by knowledge, is fundamental
to Rabelais’s evangelism and at the same time
runs counter to the Protestant view that humans
are fundamentally corrupt and fallen.
Frère Jean becomes one of Rabelais’s most
memorable characters and serves as a counter-
point to another friend, the self-centered and spir-
itually weak Panurge. During the storm scene
in the Fourth Book Panurge, petrified with fear,
prays to various saints that he, with no reference
to his fellow crew members, will be saved and
in return he vows that he will build chapels in
their honor. In contrast, Pantagruel makes a fer-
vent plea directly to God that they all be saved
but that ultimately His will be done (4BK 19,
21). While depending on God alone, Pantagruel
works feverishly to save his ship, hence by his
actions rejecting the Lutheran notion of the fu-
tility of human conduct.
The eventual bitter rift between Protestants
and evangelicals is epitomized by the mutual an-
tipathy between Rabelais and Calvin. Probable
onetime acquaintances, Calvin accused Rabelais
of “diabolical effrontery” in his Treatise on
Scandals (Traité des scandales). Rabelais pro-
vided a scathing riposte in the Fourth Book, with
the generally understated Pantagruel describing
“les Calvins démoniaques” as deformed mon-
sters in direct opposition with nature (32).
The theme of the inherent goodness of nature
distinguishes Rabelais’s religious thought. Ra-
belais’s works champion the notion that igno-
rance of nature, be it that of the human body or
any of God’s creations, is ignorance of God. It
is difficult to discern a coherent religious doc-
trine from a comic work. As Rabelais never
chose to expound on his doctrinal preferences for
Reform in religious treatises or other more
straightforward writings, it can be assumed that
he preferred expressing his evidently strongly
held beliefs in a fictional narrative that could best
represent the humor and paradoxes of the human
condition.
While taking issue with aspects of the eccle-
siastical state, it is notable that Rabelais never
broke from the Roman Church. Indeed, he re-
mained a priest all of his life, first Franciscan,
then Benedictine, and finally secularized. In 1540
he succeeded in having his two living children
legitimized by the Pope. At his death, he received
a Catholic burial.
Published evangelical writings tended to di-
minish as religious disputes between the state,
Protestants, and Catholics hardened and became
militant. Thirteen years passed between the pub-
lication of Rabelais’s Gargantua and his Third
Book. After the official advent of the Religious
Wars in 1559, evangelical traces in literary writ-
ings are couched in stark Protestant or Catholic
terms. In Montaigne’s Essays (1590–98), evan-
gelical themes disappear as he prefers to consider
humans in and of themselves rather than as
God’s creations (see Religion).
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais,
Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
1998); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pan-
tagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991).
Margaret Harp
 F
FANFRELUCHES ANTIDOTÉES This puz-
zling chapter is found in Gargantua 2 and is a
purported translation by the narrator of a treatise
found at the end of a genealogy of Gargantua.
The narrator explains that the document was
found inside a large bronze tomb uncovered in
the Chinon region. The treatise was partially de-
stroyed by rats and is thus incomplete. The word
fanfreluches is derived from fanfeluce, meaning
“trifle,” and vulgar Latin fanfaluca, meaning “air
bubble.” Cotgrave’s Dictionary of the French
and English Tongues defines it as “vanities, fop-
peries, fooleries, fond tricks.” As for “antido-
tées,” meaning “provided with an antidote,” this
term first appears in French in Pantagruel 33.
The meaning of this poem resists interpretation,
although references to the Pope and Charles V
are evident. Within the larger context of Gar-
gantua, this chapter parallels the Enigmatic
Prophecy at the end of the book, and both poems
appear in a later collection of Mellin de Saint-
Gelais’s poetry (1574). The Fanfreluches anti-
dotées and the Enigmatic Prophecy frame Gar-
gantua and recall the prologue where the reader
is advised both to discover the “sustantificque
mouelle” or marrow of this seemingly popular
book and to avoid overly eager allegorical inter-
pretations à la frère Lubin. While traditional her-
meneutics are called into question in this chapter,
it has also been suggested that this enigma is an
attempt to illustrate the graphic nature of lan-
guage, building on Geoffroy Tory’s linguistic
theories in Champ fleury.
Readings: Jean Plattard, “Rabelais et Mellin de
Saint-Gelais,” RER 9 (1911): 90–108; Jacques Pons,
“Recherches sur les ‘Fanfreluches antidotées,’ ”
BAARD 8 (1999): 471–84 and 9 (2000) 569–88; Eva
Tsuquiashi-Paddesio, “Le bruissement silencieux de la
graphie dans ‘Les fanfreluches antidotées,’ ” EC 28
(1988): 48–57.
E. Bruce Hayes
FARCE, ELEMENTS OF The late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries were a watershed
era for farce in France. From this period, nearly
two hundred farces survive, the most popular be-
ing the Farce de Maistre Pathelin. The influence
of this genre on Rabelais’s work is pronounced
and takes on two principal forms: explicit refer-
ences to contemporary farces, which arguably
number in the hundreds (with nearly two dozen
references to Pathelin alone), and structural,
where certain episodes within Rabelais’s work
contain many of the mechanisms of farce. One
of the few self-references Rabelais makes in his
work refers to a farce in which he performed
while a medical student in Montpellier, the Farce
de la femme mute (3BK 34). Structurally, many
episodes within Rabelais’s work resemble farces.
More obvious examples are the public debate be-
tween Panurge and Thaumaste (P 19–20), Pan-
urge’s attempted seduction and humiliation of the
Haughty Parisian Lady (P 21–22), his encoun-
ter with the sheep merchant Dindenault (4BK 6–
8), and the Lord Basché episode (4BK12–15).
These episodes include theatrical indicators such
as stage directions, an audience, and an emphasis
on physical gestures, and, in the case of the Pan-
urge and Dindenault episode, the prose narrative
is momentarily interrupted with a theatrical dia-
logue, a phenomenon found elsewhere in Rabe-
lais’s work (e.g., Panurge’s conversation with
Trouillogan [3BK 36] and Panurge and Panta-
gruel’s discussion of Triboullet [3BK 38]).
Some of the episodes containing farcical ele-
ments are Pantagruel’s encounter with the Eco-
lier Limousin or student from Limoges (P 6) and
his meeting with Panurge (P 9). Each of the
books presents farcical episodes, such as Janotus
de Bragmardo’s harangue in Gargantua (19)
and Judge Bridoye in the Third Book (39–42).
While the subject matter of the farces of this pe-
riod focused on marital jealousies and petty con-
76 Fezandat, Michel
niving, Rabelais’s farcical episodes center on hu-
manistic debates of the time. Instead of the
anonymous characters found in traditional farce,
the participants in Rabelais’s work represent op-
posing systems of thought. Rabelais’s inventive
and innovative use of farce produces a new kind
of farce, more radical and critical than its popular
counterpart, as well as a new hybrid form of hu-
manist satire.
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais,
Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
1998); Carol Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow:
University of Glasgow, 1983); Gustave Cohen, “Ra-
belais et le théâtre,” RER 9 (1911): 1–72; Emmanuel
Philopot, “Notes sur quelques farces de la Renais-
sance,” RER 9 (1911): 365–422.
E. Bruce Hayes
FEZANDAT, MICHEL (ff. 1538–77) Pari-
sian bookseller who published the “definitive”
edition of the Third Book and the first edition of
the complete Fourth Book, both in 1552. The
Fourth Book was quickly reprinted, also for him,
before several pirated editions appeared illegally
(see also Printing).
Readings: Stephen Rawles and Michael A. Screech,
A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais
Before 1626, ER 20 (Geneva: Droz, 1987).
Stephen Rawles
FICINO, MARSILIO (1433–99) Florentine
humanist, philosopher, and philologist who was
largely responsible for disseminating Neopla-
tonic theories throughout Europe during the Ren-
aissance. Chosen by Cosimo de’ Medici to trans-
late the works of Plato and to head the Platonic
Academy in Florence, Ficino was also trained as
a physician and ordained as a priest in 1477. In
general his writings effect a reconciliation of Pla-
tonic and Christian love; and although he at-
tacked astrology in a 1477 treatise entitled Dis-
putation against the Judgment of Astrologers
(Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum), other
writings of his, such as the Book of Life, bespeak
a fascination with magic, astrology, and mysti-
cism. Whether Rabelais, who shared many of
these interests, actually borrowed directly from
Ficino is uncertain. Clearly, echoes of Platonism
and Neoplatonism—including references to di-
vine love, the quest for a transcendent Ideal, Bac-
chic furor, allegory, hidden meanings, and even
the “Ideas of Plato”—abound in the Pantagrue-
line tales, but often the treatment of these Pla-
tonic topoi or commonplaces is mock serious;
subverted by scatology, humor, and empirical
considerations; or counterbalanced by alternative
philosophies. As a result, some scholars contend
that Rabelais is actually parodying Ficino’s the-
ories in such examples of satirical eulogy as the
Praise of Debts and the Messer Gaster epi-
sodes. Whether one accepts or rejects this inter-
pretation, many experts agree that Plato’s influ-
ence on Rabelais is far greater, and much more
positive, than any specific echoes of Ficino that
inform the Pantagrueline tales.
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-
tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany, NY:
State University of New York, 1969); Christine Raf-
fini, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Cas-
tiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Ap-
proaches in Renaissance Platonism (New York: Peter
Lang, 1998); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:
Duckworth, 1979).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
FIFTH BOOK (CINQUIESME LIVRE) The
posthumous Fifth Book has long fueled the in-
terest of Rabelais critics. As early as 1549, we
find a Fifth Book of the Feats and Sayings of
Noble Pantagruel (Cinquiesme. Livre des faictz
et dictz du noble Pantagruel. Auquelz sont com-
prins, les grans Abus, et d’esordonne vie de, Plu-
sieurs Estatz, de ce monde. Composez par M.
Francoys Rabelays D’octeur en Medecine et
Abstracteur de quinte Essence), which was in
fact a compilation of two other works: first, the
Regnars traversant by Jean Bouchet, Rabelais’s
friend from Poitou, which featured a virulent
condemnation of the nobility, the Church, justice,
courtesans, hypocrites, and monks; and second,
an adaptatation of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of
Fools (Grand Nef des fols), published by Fran-
çois Juste in 1530, which may be realistically
attributed to Bouchet, perhaps in collaboration
with Rabelais. This compilation of older texts is
a violent satire of the justice system and of
monks, and it is difficult to know whether the
two friends backed the updating of this attack on
the “folles fiances du monde.”
In 1564 the Fifth Book of Heroic Feats and

Sayings of the Good Pantagruel appeared with
no indication as to the place of publication or
editor. However, a final quatrain was signed “Na-
ture quite,” an anagram used by the doctor Jean
de Mayerne, known as Turquet. In comparison
to Ringing Island published two years earlier,
the work reprises all of the preceding volume
with the exception of the chapter on the Apedef-
tes or “ignorant ones,” adding a prologue and
thirty-two additional chapters. This long version
is found in an unsigned manuscript of the six-
teenth century containing the fragment of a pro-
logue, but without the two chapters devoted
to the ball in the kingdom of Quinte-Essence
(a game of chess transposed from Francesco
Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili). In the
chapter on the Lantern supper, the manuscript
also includes a list of dances inspired by the Dis-
ciple de Pantagruel (accompanied by a note from
the copyist indicating that “the following is what
was marginal or not understood in the present
book: Servato in 4. lib. Panorgium ad nuptias”
[“Having watched over Panurge in four books
up to his marriage”]).
Since the seventeenth century, critics have
been divided on the authenticity of this work: is
it the creation of forgers, or is it completely or
partially authentic, a Rabelaisian text revised by
an interpolator or editors? If Rabelais is the au-
thor, moreover, does the volume figure as the
conclusion of the Fourth Book voyage? Or is it
instead an assemblage of disparate fragments? In
debates on these issues, analyses of content (fo-
cusing on the author’s familiarity with Touraine,
his erudition, the intertexts that are utilized) and
style lead to contradictory conclusions: some
point to plagiarism, while others construct hy-
potheses assessing the degree to which the frag-
ments are complete and their date of composi-
tion.
An examination of the three known forms of
the text yields three parallel readings of two
groups of manuscripts, which are difficult to de-
cipher. (This explains the multiple variants in the
transcriptions of proper names, the erasures, and
the blanks in the manuscript.) The modifications
affecting the beginnings of chapters seem to re-
flect poorly classified papers and a desire to
avoid disparities in the succession of chapters.
For the end of the text, the copyist and editor
Fifth Book 77
have made selections and reclassified certain
sketches. In the manuscript we find Rabelais’s
memories of his youth in Poitou, along with a
mention of the lantern of Pierre Lamy.
The first series of documents, present in all
three forms of the text, corresponds to the first
fifteen chapters of Ringing Island, which con-
tains an apocryphal sixteenth chapter on the Ape-
deftes (“the ignorant”) with its satire of the Court
of Auditors (“Cour des Comptes”) and the finan-
cial world that is far removed from Rabelais’s
usual linguistic habits. The two other forms of
the text introduce in its place a segment entitled
“Outre,” an incomplete chapter that is incompat-
ible with the episode of the Apedeftes, but which,
beginning in 1567, editors nonetheless include in
the Fifth Book as chapter 7.
The second series of sketches is composed of
a prologue, which is in fact a draft of the Third
Book prologue, and a narration detailing the end
of the navigation with the episodes of Quinte-
Essence, the Isle of Odes, the Frères Fredons, the
Pays de Satin, the Pays des lanternes, and the
Oracle of the Bottle. Certain critics see in this
book the completion of the Fourth Book voyage.
It could also be the journey initially envisioned
at the end of the Third Book, a voyage with sym-
bolic steps which was scheduled to take the he-
roes from Saint-Malo, along the French coast
(the kingdom of Quinte, Brest; the Isle of the
Fredons, Oléron, with a stop at La Rochelle, and
probably a river navigation, suggested by the Isle
of Odes), through Poitou, the country of Lan-
terns, and all the way to the Dive Boutille in
Chinon—the first town in the world: this French
itinerary is underlined in the text itself by geo-
graphical indications.
Whereas the first series of sketches contains
virulent religious and judicial satire, punctuated
with monsters and echoes of contemporary voy-
ages that recall the Fourth Book, the second se-
ries, despite its Frères Fredons and critique of
monastic orders, Lent, and confession, is distin-
guished primarily by its hermeticism. Panurge
experiences a true ritual initiation, presided over
by Quinte, the Lantern queen, and the priestess
Bacbuc, replete with ancient and mysterious
symbolism: the descent by tetradic degrees fol-
lows the psychogony of Plato’s Timaeus. How-
78 Folengo, Teofilo
ever, it is impossible to determine the narrator’s
attitude toward these traditional symbols.
Is the Artistotelian character Entelechy the
mistress of world harmony, the embodiment of
essence in its most perfect and consummate
form? Yet her officers, alchemists claiming to ex-
tract essence from matter, are prone to activities
labeled inanis opera or “foolish works” by Eras-
mus in his Adages, and the port of Quinte es-
sence is called Mateotechnie or “vain science.”
In fact, Panurge’s poetic furor seems to be a fu-
sion of Platonism and hermeticism, unless it is
parodic. An alchemical interpretation of the
book, with its introduction of different steps in
the production of the philosopher’s stone (subli-
mation in the episode of Quinte, rubification in
the narration of Bacchus’s conquest of India), is
clearly suggested. This version of the Fifth Book,
perhaps intended at its inception for a small num-
ber of initiates, is inscribed in the alchemical
book’s rise to fashion during the 1560s, when
editors or printers published multiple works of
alchemical poetry, alchemical narrative, reflec-
tions on the antiquity of alchemy, alchemical
readings of Francesco Colonna, and writings by
Paracelsus. It is possible that this Paracelsian
context prompted Doctor Jean Turquet de May-
erne to publish a narrative featuring Quinte-
Essence. While the episode may not be Paracel-
sian by design (although one wonders if
Paracelsus was known earlier in France, through
the intermediary of German humanists connected
to the du Bellay circle), it became so by virtue
of its reception.
In this work, we also find all the characteristics
of the the crypted and steganographic text typical
of Rabelais, who uses polysemic names (quinte,
“quinte essence,” a musical term and “caprice;”
esclots, “clogs” and “slaves”) and a surfeit of al-
lusions in the style of Lucian, who continues to
inform the Rabelaisian text. Indeed, the country
of lanterns already appears in True History.
This editorial hoax involved passing off read-
ing notes and texts from different drafts, in var-
ious stages of completion, as the Fifth Book, at-
tempting to persuade us that Rabelais penned a
sequel to the Fourth Book voyage which he con-
cluded with the words “Sela. Beuvons” (sela, the
last word of psalms; beuvons, or “let us drink,”
corresponding to the end of Erasmus’s Praise of
Folly). They forged the chimera of a Fifth Book,
which is of inestimable worth in gauging the
measure of Rabelais’s creation; but it is not the
Quint livre that Rabelais would have given us.
Readings: Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault sens
(Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Alfred Glauser,
Le faux Rabelais ou de l’inauthenticité du Cinquiesme
livre (Paris: Nizet, 1975); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais
grammairien—De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes
d’authenticité (Geneva: Droz, 1981); M. Huchon, Le
cinquiesme livre—Actes du colloque international de
Rome (16–19 octobre 1998), ER 40 (Geneva: Droz,
2001); Mireille Huchon, “Sur la nef des fols du monde
avec le prétendu Ve livre apocryphe de Rabelais de
1549,” Marginalité et littérature (Nice: ILF-CNS,
2000); Verdun L. Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enquête
II. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquiesme livre (Paris:
Nizet, 1975).
Mireille Huchon
FOLENGO, TEOFILO (1491–1544) Bene-
dictine monk and well-known macaronic poet,
mentioned three times by Rabelais: in the giant
genealogy of P 1, à propos of his creation Fra-
cassus; at the end of the list of books in the Li-
brary of Saint-Victor (P 7), as author of a pa-
tria diabolorum; and in the Third Book, chapter
11, during a discussion about dice (OC 1268 n.
9).
Of Folengo’s works in macaronic, that is, syn-
tactically and metrically correct Latin verse in-
terspersed with regional and dialect “Italian,” his
mock epic Baldus had an enormous influence on
Rabelais’s “chronicles.” Unfortunately, too many
critics are unaware that there are four very dif-
ferent versions of the Baldus, known respectively
as the Paganini (1517), Toscolana (1521), Cipa-
dense (early 1530s), and Vigaso Cocaio (1552).
The French “translation,” or rather adaptation, of
1606, the Histoire Maccaronique de Merlin Coc-
caie prototype de Rabelais . . . is based on the
Vigaso Cocaio version, which Rabelais could not
have known, and is also much influenced by Ra-
belais himself. It should not therefore be quoted
as a source.
The Baldus, in the Toscolana version that is
probably Rabelais’s inspiration, is an enormous
mock epic in twenty-five cantos. After a comic
invocation to the Macaronic Muses, who live on
a lake of milk with shores of butter on which

cauldrons perpetually cook pasta, the first canto
recounts the love of Baldus’s parents in the con-
text of a courtly tournament. Cantos 2–10 are set
in Cipada, where Baldus grows up ignorant of
his origins as a youthful hooligan, with his
friends the rogue Cingar, the giant Fracassus, and
the dog-man Falchettus. The following cantos
trace Baldus’s gradual transformation into an
epic hero, via fantastic adventures including a
storm at sea, a battle with pirates, stones of in-
visibility, and a dragon who turns into a beautiful
woman, and encounters with—among many oth-
ers—a sorceress, a centaur, assorted devils and
mythological beings, a personified Manto (foun-
der of Mantua), and the helpful magician Mer-
linus Coccaius (Folengo’s pseudonym). The ad-
ventures have no conclusion, but simply end, in
a pumpkin where feigning poets have to have a
tooth extracted for every lie they tell.
This surrealist spoof of Virgil contains more
violence than Rabelais’s “chronicles,” more sca-
tology, and more raucous laughter, but Rabelais
found in it, besides the storm and sheep-
drowning episodes, a number of congenial ele-
ments: the trickster Cingar (Panurge), the
fleet-of-foot Falchettus (Carpalim), the boy-hero-
turned-Christian-prince, the frequent change of
tone and style (chivalric to earthy to erudite to
fantastic), the pointed satire of monks, and the
corruption of the Catholic Church. Folengo, un-
like Rabelais, was probably a Lutheran sympa-
thizer, but they agreed on many doctrinal mat-
ters.
The language barrier is regrettable, because
stylistic similarities abound. Rabelais uses a
number of Folengo’s metaphors and colorful
curses, and they shared a linguistic gusto which
loves playing with quotations (Omnia vincit
amor, tamen ipsa [hunger] superchiat amorem)
and inventing new language: the cry of an en-
raged Charon as he bears down on the heroes is
“Cra cra: tif trafnot: sgneflet: canatauta: riogna.”
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and Fol-
engo Once Again,” Rabelais in Context: Proceedings
of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. Barbara C.
Bowen (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications,
1993); Carlo Cordié, “Sulla fortuna di Teofilo Folengo
in Francia e in particolare sull’ Histoire maccaronique
de Merlin Coccaie, prototype de Rabelais,” Cultura
letteraria e tradizione popolare in Teofilo Folengo:
Food 79
Atti del convegno tenuto a Mantova il 15–17 ottobre
1977, ed. Ettore Bonora and Mario Chiesa (Milan: Fel-
trinelli, 1979); Teofilo Folengo, Baldus, ed. Emilio
Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1989; text of Vigaso Cocaio
ed., with Italian translation); Opus Merlini Cocaii, ed.
Angelo Nuovo et al. (Mantua: Associazione Amici
Merlini Cocai, 1994; facsimile reprint of Toscolana
edition in black-letter); Anthony Presti Russell, “Epic
agon and the Strategy of Reform in Folengo and Ra-
belais,” CLS 34 (1997): 119–48.
Barbara C. Bowen
FOOD Probably no work of fiction is more
thoroughly stuffed with references to food than
Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais
uses food and eating habits to delineate character
and to illustrate his humanistic polemic toward
every imaginable topic, and from the marrow-
bone to the Holy Bottle, food and drink are em-
ployed with comic effect to subvert the normal
order of the universe. Throughout the text, de-
portment at mealtime is also used as an index of
refinement and civility as his characters learn to
curb their base and unfettered instincts.
The prologue to Gargantua offers clues to the
reader on how his book should be ingested. Al-
though the text may be coarse and unpromising
at first sight, like a marrowbone, with gnawing,
doglike persistence the reader will finally reach
the nourishing interior and be able to lick out the
savory substance. Which is to say that despite the
ribaldry, Rabelais had a serious message to im-
part, and by drawing his unwitting audience in
with crude and often grotesque depictions of in-
gestion and bodily expulsion, he teaches them a
lesson.
The mock-heroic account of Gargantua’s
birth is a case in point. We are introduced to a
carnivalesque feast in which Gargamelle, his
mother, succumbs to the overwhelming prenatal
craving to gorge on tripe drawn from 367,014 fat
oxen. This induces labor, and the first words of
the infant giant are Da mihi potum—“Give me
drink.” These characters are driven by pure un-
controlled and insatiable appetite, as befits their
names, which all refer to the capacity of their
enormous gullets. Although one can only expect
an infant’s behavior to be totally unrestrained,
Rabelais is reminding his readers that uncouth
peasants are equally uncivilized. The fare would
80 Food
have been immediately recognizable to a
sixteenth-century audience as the food of peas-
ants: tripe, sausages, smoked tongues, and organ
meats all washed down with copious drafts of
cheap plonk. But more specifically these were
festival foods, to be consumed during Carnival
before the Lenten food restrictions imposed by
the Catholic Church went into effect and when
all meat had to be consumed in one wild, orgi-
astic, gluttonous debauch.
But Gargantua does eventually learn to curb
his urges. After a failed education at the hands
of scholastics who give him bacon and goat stew
and teach him to drink early in the morning, he
is eventually placed under the tutelage of the hu-
manist Ponocrates. Only then does he learn to eat
sober and frugal meals according to the recom-
mendations of Galenic medicine, with which Ra-
belais the physician would have been thoroughly
conversant. This didactic episode, as with many
others, traces the development of self-control in
precisely the ways that humanists such as Eras-
mus were prescribing for the upbringing of boys.
It also serves to remind readers that it is only
base peasants who comport themselves without
manners, eat without rule, and give vent to their
bodily functions in public.
Rabelais is not always so unequivocal about
his attitude toward food, and most passages leave
considerable ambiguity. For instance, in 4BK 59,
where Pantagruel visits the land of the Gastro-
latres, or worshippers of the belly, it is not en-
tirely clear whether he means this as a simple
parody of his own religion in its most grotesque
form, or simply a rhapsodic paean to the pleas-
ures of the palate. For several pages he cata-
logues a voluminous menu of foods that includes
items that would not be out of place on the royal
banqueting table. Noticeable here are white
bread, salads, chilled wine, various elegant meat
pies, venison, dozens of wild fowl, rice and al-
mond paste, and even sturgeon and whales. The
items stand in dramatic contrast to the peasant
fare of other books, and the names of the dishes
are almost certainly taken from cookbooks of the
era. Presumably his readers’ mouths would be
watering at such succulent provender, until the
god Gaster presents them with a plate of his own
feces to examine. Rabelais’s own attitude to
these delicacies remains ambiguous. It is neither
a clear-cut criticism of noble eating habits nor a
simple gastronomic tour of sixteenth-century
France. Rabelais’s food imagery cannot be writ-
ten off as a simple exhortation advocating mod-
eration.
At the very end of Book 5, Pantagruel and
his companions reach the Temple of the Holy
Bottle, wherein the oracle dispenses truth. Its mi-
raculous draughts savor of whatever the drinker
imagines, a different variety for each palate. In
the presence of the high priestess Bacbuc, the
supplicant Panurge is delivered unto the Holy
Bottle; and it is hardly surprising that when Pan-
urge consults this bottle about whether or not he
should marry, the sage advice issued forth is:
“Trinch” (“Drink”). Eating the text of his fate,
he is transported to an ecstatic union with the
divine and succumbs to poetic frenzy. Intoxica-
tion literally reunites the group with their primal
creative energy, and as the inscriptions proclaim,
“In wine there is truth” (5BK 45). What the
group actually recites, however, is more bawdy
verse, perhaps reminding the reader that there is
no mystery beyond the satisfying of the most
fundamental urges: eating, drinking, and sex. Al-
though the authorship of this last book has been
disputed, this final idea is unmistakably Rabelai-
sian. Laughter may be man’s proper lot, but to
get there one must drink deeply, whether by way
of taking in the pleasures of the body or the joys
of learning—and ideally, both.
Readings: Michel Jeanneret, “Et tout pour la tripe!”
Littéraire 319 (1994): 36–39; Michel Jeanneret, A
Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Ren-
aissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes
(Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991); Michel Jean-
neret, “ ‘Ma patrie est une citrouille’: Thèmes alimen-
taires dans Rabelais et Folengo,” Littérature et gas-
tronomie: Papers on French Seventeenth Century
Literature, ed. Ronald W Tobin (Paris, 1985); Michel
Jeanneret, “Quand la fable se met à table: Nourriture
et structure narrative dans Le Quart livre,” Poetique:
Revue de theorie et d’analyse litteraires 13.54 (1983):
163–80; Elise-Noël McMahon, “Gargantua, Panta-
gruel and Renaissance Cooking Tracts: Texts for Con-
sumption,” Neophilologus 76.2 (1992): 186–97;
Anthony Phelan, “Rabelais’s Sister: Food, Writing,
and Power,” Günter Grass’s Der Butt: Sexual Politics
and the Male Myth of History, ed. Philip Brady, Tim-
othy McFarland, and John J. White (Clarendon: Ox-

ford Publication, 1990); Daniel Soudan, “La Table de
Rabelais,” BAARD 6.1 (2002): 39–40.
Kenneth Albala and Robin Imhof
FOOLS AND FOLLY Fools of various stripes
inhabit all of Rabelais’s works, but none more
so than the Third Book. It is here that the reader
finds endless echoes of Erasmus’s Praise of
Folly (1509), from Panurge’s Praise of Debts
at the beginning of the work to the concluding
mock encomium of the Pantagruelion. Pan-
urge’s seemingly endless series of consultations
is brought to a pseudoresolution with the “ad-
vice” offered by the fool Triboullet (45) that
Panurge interprets as a call to go in search of the
Dive Bouteille or Holy Bottle. Seven chapters
earlier, Pantagruel and Panurge engage in an
exchange that can be characterized as a Rabelai-
sian Praise of Folly. In the intervening chapters,
the reader discovers Judge Bridoye, a fool who
is perfectly rational about his irrational behavior.
Panurge’s character is that of the farcical buffoon
or badin, and the Third Book can be seen as a
confrontation between wise and foolish fools.
Fools occupied an ambiguous position in both
medieval and Renaissance society, both privi-
leged and marginalized. Although fools were
sometimes seen as diabolic, they also spoke the
unspeakable, which provided them with a repu-
tation as seers. This ambiguity of meaning con-
cerning fools’ pronouncements is prominently on
display in the Third Book.
As Rabelais’s work makes clear, fools and the
nature of folly were extremely popular topics
among Renaissance humanists. At the end of the
fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
works such as Guyot Marchand’s Danse maca-
bre (1486) and Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools
(1494) popularized the idea of a pervasive folly
that existed in all levels of society. In his mock
encomium Praise of Folly, Erasmus posited a
double notion of folly, worldly and divine. Al-
though the former category essentially repeated
the negative connotations of universal human
folly put forward in many medieval texts, the lat-
ter built upon the Pauline notion of Christian
folly and the idea that Christians are viewed as
fools by the wise of the world. Erasmus also
drew upon the tradition of the morosophe, or
wise fool, while his narrator Stultitia constantly
Forests 81
vacillates between wise and foolish folly. The
morosophe is central to the debates that encom-
pass the Third Book and Panurge’s perplexity.
This multidimensionality of folly leads to ambi-
guity in Rabelais’s work, leaving to debate which
type of folly each character displays and whose
pronouncements the reader can trust.
Readings: Elizabeth Chesney, “The Theme of Folly
in Rabelais and Ariosto,” JMRS 7 (1977): 67–93; Gér-
ard Defaux, “Sagesse et folie d’Erasme à Molière,”
MLN 91.4 (1976): 655–71; Edwin M. Duval, The De-
sign of Rabelais’s Tiers livre de Pantagruel (Geneva:
Droz, 1997); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à
l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); Walter Kai-
ser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
E. Bruce Hayes
FORESTS Forests in sixteenth-century France
were divided between the crown, the Church, no-
blemen, and the peasantry who had common-law
pasture and felling rights in certain areas. The
forest had long contributed significantly to local
economies, with different social groups making
various and often competing demands on the re-
sources: as pasture, heat source, raw materials,
income for impoverished lords who sold their
wood, or hunting grounds. With the population
increases in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
there had been significant deforestation, but in
the Middle Ages the transformation of forests
into agricultural land was seen as a victory of
civilization and Christendom over wild and pa-
gan spaces, and there was little sense of the forest
as a finite resource. However, sixteenth-century
France, also subject to rapid population increase,
witnessed a crisis of sorts in the management of
forest resources, and significant steps were taken
toward a centralized royal policy. Deforestation
was gradually seen less as a victory of civiliza-
tion and more as an attack on precious national
resources.
Several French forests are featured in Rabe-
lais’s first two books, and the forests of the last
three books are almost all imaginary, although
fact and imagination are often blended. The most
far-fetched forest is that on the Ile des Ferre-
ments, or Toolmaking Island, where the trees
grow weapons (5BK 9). Yet the episode gives
rise to a weighty scientific discourse on why trees
82 Fourth Book
are animate. Panurge’s fable of the fox and lion
(P 15) is set in the forest of Fontainebleau (called
at that time Bière), transforming it into a myth-
ical space in which animals talk. The Parisians
send Gargantua’s mare to live in this forest (G
21), although the narrator tells us he thinks she
is no longer there. Fontainebleau had long been
exploited for its sandstone, which had signifi-
cantly damaged the foliage: it is perhaps for this
reason that it had a popular reputation as a grim
and sterile desert, which Rabelais refers to when
describing the Ile de Cassade (5BK 10). The Bois
de Vède, near Rabelais’s ancestral home, be-
comes strategic territory in the Picrocholine wars
(G 34). Thélème, which is, we are told, near the
forest of Port-Huault on the Loire, also has its
own fictitious forest on the edges of which lodge
the tailors and artisans that provide for the Thé-
lèmites (G 52, 56). The episode in the “forest of
Beauce” rewrites the environmental history of
the region, which in reality had always been a
steppe, creating a legendary originary forest on
French soil that had never really existed (G 16).
Some scenes indicate the importance of the
forest to economic life in Rabelais’s time. The
felling of trees is paired with economic consid-
erations in the prologue to the Fourth Book
through the character of Couillatris, a woodcut-
ter. The forest on the Ile des Macreons (com-
pared to the Ardennes) may be full of ancient
monuments, but it also resembles a utopian syl-
van economy (4BK 25): it is sparsely populated,
all old-growth trees, and the islanders are car-
penters. Panurge’s Praise of Debts includes a
discourse on deforestation and economics (3BK
2). Panurge has felled the trees on his property
and sold the ashes: selling old wood was com-
mon among landowners, but Panurge, selling
ashes, has ruined rather than helped his estate’s
finances. He prefers the symbolic profit of having
proven his “strength,” boasting of having trans-
formed the savage, dark forest into bright clear-
ings. This is a very medieval view of clear cut-
ting, set against a more pragmatic and arguably
more modern view of profit and resource man-
agement. As this discourse shows, forests in Ra-
belais serve as sites of contention between mul-
tiple discourses.
Readings: Michel Devèze, La vie de la forêt fran-
çaise au 16e siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1961); Raphaël
Larrère and Olivier Nougarède, Des hommes et des
forêts (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); V. L. Saulnier, Rabe-
lais dans son enquête, vol. 2 (Paris: SEDES, 1982).
Louisa Mackenzie
FOURTH BOOK (QUART LIVRE) The final
version of Rabelais’s last complete Pantagrueline
chronicle was published in 1552, a decade after
the publication of the Third Book and one year
before the humanist’s death. Replete with mock-
heroic episodes, it recounts the voyage under-
taken by Pantagruel to assist his ne’er-do-well
friend Panurge in seeking the advice of the Di-
vine Bottle. The intent and destination of the trip
are rarely mentioned and are ultimately unfulfil-
led. By establishing a sea voyage to unknown
lands as the narrative premise of the Fourth
Book, Rabelais incorporated a topic that both ex-
cited and challenged his contemporaries. The
multiple transformations occurring in European
society due to the Italian Wars, the nascent Re-
form movement, and scientific advances were
forcing the established medieval community to
change and, increasingly, to splinter and be at
odds with itself. The Fourth Book functions as a
cautionary, albeit comic, tale. It provides both a
caricature of the multiple, often divisive, groups
that were isolating themselves from each other in
European society and a model of a diverse but
coherent community that accommodates, and in-
deed welcomes, change but remains faithful to
traditional Christian doctrine. Pantagruel and his
fellow travelers on the ship the Thalamège rep-
resent this latter group. From the outset of the
Fourth Book, Rabelais takes great care to estab-
lish the primacy of the Pantagruelian community.
Throughout his oeuvre, Rabelais makes liberal
use of the term Pantagruelism, but it is only in
the definitive prologue of the Fourth Book that
he defines it: “a certain gaiety of spirit confected
in disdain for fortuitous things.” The narrative
proceeds to indicate that this gaiety is based on
a resolute faith and generous regard toward oth-
ers.
The Fourth Book is unique among Rabelais’s
writings in that a prototype for it exists. This
work, containing only eleven chapters, was pub-
lished by Rabelais’s Lyonnais editor, Pierre de
Tours, in 1548, under the title Le Quart Livre de
Pantagruel. It remains unclear whether Rabelais

authorized the publication of the 1548 version.
Abundant typographical variations and changes
exist between the two editions. Even where epi-
sodes remain basically the same, myriad small
differences appear. The most striking addition to
the opening paragraph of the 1552 Fourth Book
is the parenthetical reference to the early Chris-
tians at prayer. For Rabelais, as for all evangel-
ical humanists of his time, the first Christians
constituted the definitive ideal community. His
evocation of these people establishes an evan-
gelical tone in the text and underscores the rap-
port between these few faithful and the Panta-
gruelists.
In the narrative of the initial version, only five
of the islands also described in the 1552 edition
appear. They comprise the first section of the
later edition, and their stories are decidedly less
satirical than the episodes that follow. Many of
the islands that appear only in the 1552 Fourth
Book such as those of the Papimanes and the
Papefigues reflect political events dating from
1550 and 1551. Furthermore, the original 1548
episodes mentioned above reappear more fully
developed and detailed in the definitive version.
The 1552 Fourth Book contains sixty-seven
chapters, resulting in a narrative over six times
as long as its prototype. Several auxiliary texts
that accompany the 1552 Fourth Book also dis-
tinguish it from Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the
Third Book. Not only does it have the expected
prologue, but it is introduced with a letter of ded-
ication from Rabelais to his benefactor, the car-
dinal of Chastillon, Odet de Coligny. Following
the 1552 text, there is a glossary entitled the Bri-
efve Déclaration, which elucidates terms and
names used in the chronicle. Although it is
doubtful that Rabelais wrote the Déclaration, its
clarifications are of interest because for nonread-
ers of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin it provides a
French translation of the names Rabelais often
fabricated from combinations of terms from clas-
sical languages. The fact that Rabelais did not
himself include such a glossary suggests his as-
sumption that readers of the Fourth Book would
be learned scholars.
Finally, the initial chapters of the Fifth Book,
the apocryphal work long considered Rabelais’s
final text, may be considered an extension of the
Fourth Book. Scholars generally agree that while
Fourth Book 83
the 1564 publication is little more than an awk-
ward attempt to copy Rabelais’s style, they none-
theless consider its first sixteen chapters to have
been composed by Rabelais. Relating additional
encounters between newfound islands and the
Thalamège, the chapters serve as an epilogue to
the Fourth Book. Hence, the Fourth Book is ex-
tremely rich: not only does it have two versions,
each with its own prologue, but its definitive ver-
sion’s introductory letter, glossary, and supple-
ment render it encyclopedic.
The Fourth Book’s theme and complex but
finely crafted narrative make it arguably Rabe-
lais’s most intriguing work. While retaining his
previous fictional characters, Rabelais tempers
his customary gaulois humor and satire with a
rich and sophisticated commentary on the limi-
tations and ambiguities of language, the anxiety
and promise of characterizing contemporary so-
ciety, and the import and controversial nature of
evangelical concerns. In contrast with the earlier
books, the Fourth Book reveals a more thought-
ful and reflective author who nonetheless main-
tains his comic tone. Care is taken in revealing
the complexity of relationships between Gargan-
tua, Pantagruel, Frère Jean, Panurge, and Al-
cofrybas.
Some of Rabelais’s more memorable charac-
ters as well as lyrical passages appear in the
Fourth Book. There is Monsieur Gaster, “pre-
mier master of the arts of the world,” who is the
personification of hunger (4BK 57). His influ-
ence is pervasive and accounts for all of human-
kind’s creations, both good and bad. Pantagruel
witnesses and abhors the elaborate culinary of-
ferings of adoration made by Gaster’s subjects.
The Gaster episode provides a strange mix of hu-
mor and monstrosity, leaving unclear Rabelais’s
purpose in composing it. Like other episodes,
Rabelais may well not have designed it for one
specific interpretation. When viewed as a parody
of Marsilio Ficino’s portrayal of Love, the pas-
sage’s comic elements become more evident.
However, Pantagruel’s anger against the adora-
tion of Gaster belies a purely farcical episode.
The Thalamège’s encounter with the parolles
gelées (Frozen Words) highlights Rabelais’s
fascination with the nature and value of language
(55–56). Sailing in the open sea, the ship’s crew
hears men’s voices but can see no one. The pilot
84 Francis I
explains that they are crossing the Glass Sea,
near where a fierce battle took place a year be-
fore. The frigid winter air froze the sounds of
combat, but in the temperate weather they melt
and allow themselves to be heard. Pantagruel
reaches up and grabs a handful of words, throw-
ing them on deck. The narrator Alcofrybas
wishes to conserve the frozen words in jars of
oil, but Pantagruel refuses him, saying it is fool-
ish to save words; they come in abundance, par-
ticularly for jovial Pantagruelists such as them-
selves. This scene emphasizes Pantagruel’s role,
like that of all humanists, as an explorer and
seeker of the truth through the study of language
and text.
Rabelais’s last complete work is ultimately
comic, and it carries a positive and at times joy-
ful message to its reader. It is noteworthy that
the book concludes with Pantagruel’s hearty
laugh (chapter 67). Often considered Rabelais’s
most hermetic work, the Fourth Book defies strict
genre classification. Its communities are pre-
sented as comical, grotesque, satirical, sad, chi-
meric, or wise. Rabelais’s final work is unique in
that it demonstrates the optimistic and evangeli-
cal traits of early French Renaissance writings,
while still revealing the concern and disillusion-
ment that led to the Religious Wars.
Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoy-
age of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading
of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1982); Edwin Duval, “La messe, la
cène, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21
(1988): 131–41; Margaret Harp, The Portrayal of
Community in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (New York: Pe-
ter Lang, 1997); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et Ecriture:
Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz,
1987).
Margaret Harp
FRANCIS (FRANÇOIS) I (1494–1547) Son
of Charles, comte d’Angoulême, and Louise de
Savoie, ruled France from 1515 to 1547. In 1514
he married Claude de France, daughter of Louis
XII, and became king when Louis died without
sons. Most of Francis’s reign was spent at war
or in negotiations with the major powers of the
period: Henry VIII, Charles V, the Pope, and the
Sultan of Turkey. Francis did not hesitate to draw
up treaties or switch alliances when he deemed
such actions to be in the interests of France. His
endless campaigns all but exhausted the French
treasury and forced him to suspend domestic cul-
tural programs from time to time. At home, he
attempted to reform the country’s financial sys-
tem and the Parlement and to tame the ever-
growing power of the Sorbonne.
Not only a soldier, Francis was deeply com-
mitted to making his reputation as a patron of
learning and the arts. He appointed poets, pain-
ters, and scholars as “gentlemen of the chamber,”
his confidants and private staff. He brought Le-
onardo da Vinci to France in 1516, giving him a
pension and a house. Although Leonardo painted
little in the three years before his death, he had
brought with him many of his masterpieces, in-
cluding the Mona Lisa, which remained in Fran-
cis’s possession. Eager to acquire other works of
art, Francis sent buying agents to Italy. Whether
inspired by a desire for land, gold, or knowledge,
Francis also sent explorers like Verrazano and
Cartier to the New World. He developed an in-
terest in architecture and built several chateaux,
most notably Chambord and Fontainebleau. At
Fontainebleau, he surrounded himself with paint-
ings, tapestries, enamel works, classical and con-
temporary sculpture, and a library of over three
thousand books and manuscripts. An ardent ad-
mirer of Petrarch and Erasmus, Francis en-
couraged French humanists, providing pensions
and protection to writers like Clément Marot,
Saint-Gelais, and Rabelais and scholars such as
Lefèvre d’Etaples and Guillaume Budé. In
1529, to promote classical studies, he established
the chairs of Greek, Hebrew, and mathematics,
forming the foundation of the Collège de France.
He patronized and protected printers, especially
the scholar Robert Estienne, who published hu-
manist texts and translations of the Bible.
The king’s position on the Reform often ap-
pears contradictory. A traditional Catholic, he de-
nounced Lutheranism but disagreed with the Sor-
bonne as to what constituted heresy. His
personal attitude seems to have been one of sym-
pathy with the moderate reformers whom he pro-
tected while at home but who were at risk from
the Sorbonne as soon as Francis left Paris. Al-
though many cite the Affair of the Placards as
having turned the king against the evangelicals,
his policy was mostly influenced by a desire to

keep the peace at home and by political expedi-
ence abroad, which required Protestant sympa-
thies when negotiating with Henry VIII or the
German princes and a pro-Catholic stance when
dealing with Charles V or the Pope.
Francis enjoyed the work of Rabelais and
granted the author a ten-year privilege on the
publication of the Third Book in 1546. Rabelais
sprinkles his books with reminders of the king—
playing on his favorite oath, “faith of a gentle-
man,” inserting his jester Triboullet as a char-
acter (P 30; 3BK 38–45), and alluding to the
beautiful paintings at Fontainebleau (4BK 2). In
Gargantua (34, 50), Rabelais refers directly to
historical events: “If I were king of France . . . I
would castrate all those who ran away from the
field at Pavia leaving their dear prince stranded”
and “as a ransom we might have extorted
[money], holding his eldest sons as hostages.” At
the same time, Rabelais does not hesitate to sat-
irize war and the dying cult of chivalry (G 8),
both dear to Francis’s heart.
Readings: Gilbert Gadoffre, La révolution cultu-
relle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Budé
et François Ier (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Robert J. Knecht,
Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Fran-
cis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Desmond Seward, Prince of the Renaissance (New
York: Macmillan, 1973).
Megan Conway
FRÈRE JEAN (FRÈRE JAN, FRIAR JOHN,
BROTHER JOHN) Frère Jean is a monk who
recognizes the importance of connecting the re-
ligious and social dimensions of life. When he
first appears in the twenty-seventh chapter of
Gargantua, he is living in a monastery in the
central French town of Seuilly. When the soldiers
of Picrochole invade this monastery, the other
monks are so afraid that they do nothing, but
Frère Jean concludes that the prayer “Deliver us
from our enemies” requires him to drive these
invaders from the monastery’s vineyard so that
wine can still be available both for the Eucharist
and for earthly enjoyment, and this is what he
does. Thus, he has preserved sacred space from
those who tried to destroy vines that are needed
to produce wine for masses. Frère Jean will not
permit evil to triumph over good, and his first
appearance in the four books definitely written
Frère Jean 85
by Rabelais reveals how he will react to evil in
later episodes. As a sincere priest, he must serve
the social and spiritual needs of those whom he
serves. He believes that religion should be a lib-
erating force that brings people joy. After his de-
feat of Picrochole’s soldiers, Gargantua builds
Frère Jean a new type of monastery called Thé-
lème. This word means “will” in Greek, and Ra-
belais shows us that in this monastery “free will”
and not arbitrary rules govern the daily actions
of the male and female residents. Only well-
educated men and women may live there. Frère
Jean believes that those who combine free will
with respect for others will naturally accept the
deep truths of Christianity. Religious faith for
him relies on the free discovery of moral values
by liberated men and women.
As a priest who determines whether or not to
grant absolution to penitents who confess their
sins to him, Frère Jean has become a good judge
of human character. Like many other characters
in Rabelais’s four fully authenticated books,
Frère Jean sees through Panurge’s bad faith. He
knows that neither he nor any priest could per-
suade Panurge to accept the simple truth that
Christian marriage should be based on religious
commitment and on mutual love and respect.
When Frère Jean realizes that Panurge is resort-
ing to black magic in order to determine whether
or not to marry, he decides to humiliate Panurge
in an effort to shock him into a religious con-
version. In chapter 28 of the Third Book, Frère
Jean correctly calls Panurge “a sinner” who may
well have been “predestined” to cuckoldry. He
reduces the serious theological discussion as to
whether people are saved by faith alone or by
faith plus good works to an absurd level. He tells
Panurge how he can be “saved.” According to
Frère Jean’s tongue-in-cheek argument, Panurge
will become a cuckold only if his wife is beau-
tiful. If his wife is beautiful, she will treat him
well, he will have many friends, and therefore he
will be “saved.” Frère Jean understands that Pan-
urge will not respond positively to logical argu-
ments, and for that reason he tries to force him
into facing his own bad faith. Frère Jean has not
given up on Panurge, but Panurge has clearly
given up on himself. He refuses to change, and
that is why he is not receptive to the basic relig-
ious truths that Frère Jean tries to teach him.
86 Friendship
In the Fourth Book, Panurge once again pre-
tends to seek religious help from Frère Jean, but
this sincere priest is not fooled this time either.
Chapters 18 to 22 in the Fourth Book describe
a storm at sea that is very reminiscent of the
storm sequence described by Saint Paul in the
twenty-seventh chapter of his Acts of the Apos-
tles. In chapter 19, Panurge pretends that he has
just had a religious conversion. He wants Frère
Jean to stop helping the sailors and to hear his
confession. Frère Jean realizes that God will for-
give Panurge’s sins if Panurge’s repentance is
sincere even without confession to a priest. At
that moment it is more important for Frère Jean
to save lives. He certainly offers to hear Pan-
urge’s confession after the storm, but, as he sus-
pected, Panurge’s religious faith disappears as
soon as the danger ends.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Thomas M. Greene, Rabelais: A Study
in Comic Courage (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1970); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Edmund J. Campion
FRIENDSHIP A central theme, perhaps even
an ethos, of the Rabelaisian text. The earliest
known treatise on friendship is found in the Lysis
of Plato. Other classical sources include the
eighth and ninth books of Aristotle’s Nicoma-
chean Ethics and Cicero’s Laelius (De Amicitia).
These texts provided the starting point for Ren-
aissance thinkers who wrote their own treatises,
dialogues, and letters on the subject of friend-
ship. In particular, the dissemination of Cicero’s
De Amicitia cultivated an ideal of intimate affec-
tion between men of equal standing which be-
came instrumental to Renaissance theorizations
of friendship.
The pairing of Panurge and Pantagruel
stands as one of the most famous of all Renais-
sance friendships. Pantagruel conceives a spon-
taneous liking for Panurge whom he casts in the
role of Achates to his Aeneas (P 9). This situates
Panurge within the classical tradition of the epic
companion, or comes, who faithfully accompa-
nies the hero on his adventures. But Panurge is
no silent partner, and his stagy personality owes
more to the later development of the comes re-
lationship in medieval epic than to earlier clas-
sical prototypes such as Patroclus and Achilles,
Diomede and Ulysses, and Achates and Aeneas.
The medieval epic promoted the companion from
the classical role of loyal subordinate to that of
a foil or double for the epic hero. Often consid-
ered to outshine his friend and master, Panurge
fills this more capacious role with ease. He takes
the place of Pantagruel in the compromising de-
bate with Thaumaste and is never far from the
center of the action (P 18–20).
The later books do not deny the famous chap-
ter title—“How Pantagruel found Panurge,
whom he loved all his life” (P 9)—but the nature
of their friendship changes. The question of Pan-
urge’s marriage, which dominates the Third
Book, threatens entirely to supplant the older
claims of friendship. Panurge as prospective hus-
band and future cuckold becomes a less redeem-
able figure, and his relationship with Pantagruel
slips into an admonitory mode. Increasingly, the
giant takes on a more paternal role, scolding and
humoring Panurge by turns, so that the Cicer-
onian ideal of equitable friendship becomes com-
promised.
Although this possibility is never explicitly
stated, the voyage of the Fourth Book with its
all-male crew may be understood as a reaffir-
mation of masculine friendship. It takes place un-
der the shadow of Pantagruel’s promise to accept
a wife of Gargantua’s choosing when he re-
turns: the quest defers the moment when love
between men and women must supersede friend-
ship (3BK 48). Panurge and Pantagruel, accom-
panied by Epistémon, Gymnaste, and Gargan-
tua’s old friend Frère Jean, embark upon a
glorious, if troubled, bachelor party.
The convivial relationship between narrator
and reader in Rabelais’s sympotic prologues of-
fers a different model of friendship-at-first-sight
to rival that of Panurge and Pantagruel. At once
audience and drinking partner, the reader is
coaxed, cajoled, and welcomed into a commu-
nity of friends the moment he opens the book.
Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’
Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991); Ullrich Langer, The Perfect Friendship (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1994).
Andrea Walkden

FROZEN WORDS (PAROLES GELÉES)
(4BK 55–56) A curious event during the voy-
age of the Fourth Book that occurs between the
extensive episodes of the Decretals and Messere
Gaster. After leaving the Island of Papimania,
Pantagruel and his companions are enjoying
themselves eating and talking when Pantagruel
suddenly hears strange sounds. Soon, everyone
on board can hear the disembodied voices of
men, women, and children, as well as the sounds
of horses and guns. Predictably, Panurge is ter-
rified, and Pantagruel seeks to reassure his friend
by proposing four possible explanations for the
noises. First, Pantagruel recalls a Pythagorean
philosopher and mathematician named Petron
who thought that there were one hundred and
eighty-three interrelated worlds equally dispersed
on the sides and at the angles of an equilateral
triangle at the center of which Truth resided.
Throughout the ages, words, ideas, models, and
representations from this abode of Truth would
occasionally drop on certain humans like “dew
on Gideon’s fleece.” Pantagruel then remembers
that Aristotle referred to Homer’s words as “fly-
ing.” His third explanation suggests that they are
hearing some words of Plato that froze when
spoken during the winter in some harsh country.
The last hypothesis proposes that the words are
the result of the wind blowing over the severed
head and lyre of Orpheus. At this point, the pilot
interrupts the giant’s conjecturing to say that a
great and cruel war had been fought the preced-
ing winter at that very place—the edge of the
Frozen Sea. All the sounds of the battle had fro-
zen, but now that the weather was warming, the
war cries of the men, the words of the women,
the whinnying of the horses, and the clash of
arms could all be heard as they melted. To amuse
the company, Pantagruel catches several handfuls
of still frozen words and tosses them on the deck
where they shimmer in different colors. As the
companions warm the words in their hands, the
words melt and release their sounds. Unfortu-
nately, the sounds are incomprehensible and
largely unpleasant. When the narrator wishes to
save some of the red words, Pantagruel refuses,
saying it was foolish to “hoard a commodity we
were never short of.” The episode ends with Pan-
urge wishing wistfully that he had found the
Frozen Words 87
word of the Dive Bouteille among the frozen
words so that the long voyage would have ended
there.
Given Rabelais’s preoccupation with words,
the incident merits close attention. Faced with
trying to explain the unlikely situation, Panta-
gruel searches for meaning in the classical world,
and the four explanations he offers are cloaked
in a delicate combination of humor and beauty.
For the space of a few paragraphs, the bawdy,
raucous boisterousness of the Utopians is sus-
pended in a poetic moment. Pantagruel’s expla-
nations underscore his philanthropic nature, for
he is determined to interpret the Frozen Words
in terms of essential philosophical truths, Pla-
tonic ideas, or, at the very least, divine music.
Unfortunately, such things are not accessible to
everyday mortals, and the words that promised
such perfection for a brief moment are revealed
to be nothing more than the sounds of strife and
incomprehensible babble. Rabelais melts his
readers’ expectations along with the Frozen
Words with the reminder that words are espe-
cially the domain of lovers who lie and lawyers
who sell them but that they are never in short
supply.
Critical response to this episode has shifted rad-
ically over the past century since Arthur Tilley
(1907) dismissed the whole scene in a single sen-
tence: “The account of the frozen words . . . is not
productive of much mirth, but it is interesting as
showing that the travelers had now reached the
confines of the Glacial Sea” (1967:237). Sixty
years later, Marcel Tetel recognized the episode as
“a climax in [Rabelais’s] experiments with word
play” (80), and Alfred Glauser perceived Rabe-
lais’s whole oeuvre as composed of frozen words.
M. A. Screech sees the episode and the chapters
that follow it as Rabelais’s attempt to “confront
ambitiously the problem of the possibility of hu-
man knowledge within this transitory life.” More
specifically, Duval interprets the juxtaposition of
Pantagruel’s classical idealism and the brutal
sounds of battle as a devastating satire of Plato’s
theory of the Ideal and as an essential part of Ra-
belais’s strategy to push the Utopians inexorably
away from their idealistic certainty, at the begin-
ning of the voyage, that they will find the Truth at
the end of Panurge’s quest. Berry’s analysis inter-
88 Frozen Words
prets this episode as a key to our understanding of
the Decretals and Gaster by defining two oppos-
ing views of language in the “frozen” versus
“thawed” words.
Readings: Alice Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe:
A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina, 2000); Edwin Duval, The
Design of Rabelais’s Quart livre de Pantagruel (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1997); Alfred Glauser, Rabelais créateur
(Paris: Nizet, 1964); M. A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Marcel Tetel,
Rabelais (New York: Twayne, 1967); Arthur Tilley,
François Rabelais (London: Kennikat, 1907).
Megan Conway
 G
GALEN (A.D. 129–c. 199) Greek physician
whose work, often stemming from and expand-
ing on Hippocratic texts, largely informed Ra-
belais’s writing and medical practice. Taking fur-
ther the Hippocratic theory of humors, Galen
developed a classification of temperaments Ra-
belais employed in the formation and transfor-
mation of characters such as the anxious Pan-
urge and the bellicose Picrochole. Advice given
by Ponocrates to Gargantua and his Parisian
friends to leave the city and go to the countryside
one day each month for relaxation and diversion
directly stems from Galen’s practical treatise on
health maintenance: De sanitate tuenda (Hy-
giene). Also originating from Galenic theory is
the frequent Rabelaisian encouragement to read-
ers to find balance through simplicity and hu-
mility; avoiding extremes and correcting exces-
ses are deemed essential to staying in good
health—health being the most important pos-
session and indeed the primary source of happi-
ness, confidence, assurance, and ease. In practice,
Galen’s promotion of hygiene and what we
would today call “physicians’ bedside manner”
so directly influenced Rabelais’s work as a doc-
tor that mortality rates dipped 2 to 3 percent dur-
ing his tenure at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in
Lyon. Relating closely to patients, being a model
of good health and compassion so as to inspire
confidence and foster a collaborative spirit on the
part of the sick—such were some of the most
effective tools Galen made available to the Ren-
aissance doctor in his work and writing.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles
Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin,
1988).
Lesa Randall
GAMES Rabelais’s work contains hundreds of
references to games, real and imagined. The most
elaborate mention of games is found in the list
of 217 games Gargantua plays (G 22). This en-
cyclopedic list includes card games, games of
chance, and sports. The list not only contains
games, but also terms used in games (e.g., “de-
fendo,” no. 187) or ways of playing a game
(e.g., “coquinbert, qui gaigne perd,” no. 30).
Also contained in the list are swear words asso-
ciated with gaming (e.g., “reniguebieu,” no. 52)
as well as suggestive words with sexual conno-
tations (e.g., “vendre l’avoine,” no. 94, “ventre
contre ventre,” no. 109, “semer l’avoyne,” no.
184, etc.). Approximately the first third of the
list refers to card games, while the majority of
terms refer to sports. In French society, begin-
ning in the late thirteenth century, the Church,
municipal governments, and the crown issued
decrees banning certain types of games, espe-
cially card and dice games. Humanists such as
Thomas More and Erasmus criticized games
of chance, while Rabelais’s view on this matter
is more ambiguous. Immediately following this
exhaustive list of games in Gargantua 22 is a
much reduced and more refined list of games
Gargantua plays on the advice of his humanist
tutor Ponocrates. One of these is a game that
stood apart in both society and Rabelais’s work—
jeu de paume, the sport that evolved into
modern-day tennis. By decree in 1527, Francis
I established jeu de paume as an official sport
whose professional players should be compen-
sated. The end of Gargantua (58) contains an
elaborate enigmatic poem that describes the jeu
de paume in apocalyptic terms (see Enigmatic
Prophecy).
Readings: Jean-Marie Mehl, Les jeux au royaume
de France (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Michel Psichari, “Les
jeux de Gargantua,” RER 4 (1908): 1–37, 124–81,
317–61; 7 (1909): 48–67.
E. Bruce Hayes
90 Ganabin
GANABIN (4BK 66–67) The episode of Gan-
abin (which is Hebrew for “thieves” according
to the Brief Declaration) is the last one of the
Fourth Book and one of the most enigmatic. The
episode consists of two chapters, which in turn
can be subdivided into distinctive narrative parts.
Chapter 66 begins with a description of the island
by Xenomanes, who informs his companions of
the sinister nature of its habitants. Pantagruel
gives a clue for the global interpretation of the
episode by comparing its two-peaked mountain
to Mount Parnassus. In the following discussion,
Panurge and Frère Jean are as diametrically op-
posed as they are in other episodes of the Fourth
Book: Panurge wants to flee, while Frère Jean
wishes to attack. Pantagruel decides to go ashore
only to get fresh water from the island’s fountain
(“the most beautiful fountain of the world,”
which probably is an allusion to Hippocrenas, the
mythological source of inspiration). At the insti-
gation of Frère Jean, he decides to fire a salvo at
the island, in order “to salute the Muses of this
Mount Antiparnassus.”
Chapter 67 relates how Panurge, who has hid-
den himself in the ship’s storeroom, comes up on
deck, frightened by the cannonades. In his hand
he holds a cat, called Rodilardus, which, in the
dark of the ship’s hold, he had taken for a devil.
He is scratched and soiled with his own excre-
ment. The narrator explains that Panurge’s def-
ecation is a natural effect of fear and illustrates
this with two lengthy exempla, one of which is
the apocryphal ancedote of François Villon in
England. Pantagruel “[cannot] help laughing”
and summons Panurge to take a bath and to “put
on a clean white shirt.” At this Panurge bursts
out in a joyful litany of fifteen synonyms of the
word “shit,” finishing with the exclamation
“Sela! Beuvons,” the intriguing, concluding
words of the Fourth Book.
This episode has given rise to very different
appraisals and interpretations. Since Jean Fleury
(1877), critics such as Manuel de Diéguez, Al-
fred Glauser, Floyd Gray, and Jean Larmat have
considered this and the other final episodes of the
Fourth Book to be a sign of the author’s fatigue
or lack of interest, judging the last scatologic
scene in particular to be “tasteless,” “easy
comic,” and “without any conclusion, not even
provisional” (for a critical survey, see Paul J.
Smith 1987). More recently, critics have looked
for deeper significance in the final episode. For
Marcel Tetel, the Ganabin-episode is an allegory
of literary creation, imitation, and plagiarism; for
Verdun-L. Saulnier, Ganabin is the island of re-
pression, the two-peaked Mount Antiparnassus
symbolizing the Châtelet and the Conciergerie;
for Gérard Defaux, it alludes to the two-peaked
mons Capitolinus, the Roman Capitol, which
stands for the Catholic Inquisition. Alice F. Berry
and Paul J. Smith underscore the presence of the
themes of baptismal initiation undergone by Pan-
urge (descent into the dark underground, struggle
with the devil, rebirth symbolized by white cloth-
ing).
Recently, Edwin M. Duval has argued that
Ganabin constitutes the final step of a series of
three islands “that contain increasingly sinister
forms of anticaritas”: “diabolical ingenuity (Gas-
ter), sanctimonious hypocrisy (Chaneph), and
predatory force against the defenseless (Gana-
bin)”: “to find a more suitable telos than Ganabin
[the questing Pantagruelians] must not continue
beyond it but turn around and retrace their steps.”
The new study by Myriam Marrache-Gouraud,
who identifies Panurge scratched by Rodilardus
with the Mate, one of the trumps of the tarot,
proves that the final word on this crucial but en-
igmatic episode has not yet been heard.
Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, Rabelais: Homo
Logos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,
1979); Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe.
A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina, 2000); Gérard Defaux, Ra-
belais agonistes: du rieur au prophète (Geneva: Droz,
1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); My-
riam Marrache-Gouraud, ‘Hors toute intimidation’.
Panurge ou la parole singulière (Geneva: Droz,
2003); V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans son
enquête. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre
(Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écri-
ture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva:
Droz, 1987); Marcel Tetel, “La fin du Quart Livre,”
Romanische Forschungen 83 (1971): 517–27.
Paul J. Smith
GARGAMELLE Wife of Grandgousier,
mother of Gargantua. Her name, derived from
the Provençal, means “throat.” Gargamelle fea-

tures briefly at two moments of Gargantua. Her
first and longest appearance is during the chap-
ters (3–4, 6) detailing Gargantua’s conception
and birth, which develops Rabelais’s preoccu-
pation with the interiority and exteriority of bod-
ies, but enables the author to speculate on the
particular nature of the female body. Garga-
melle’s pregnancy lasts eleven months, a sign
that her son is destined for great things. The birth
is brought on by her excessive consumption of
tripe (animal intestines). As the tripe enters her
body, space becomes so limited that Gargantua
is forced into the world, but Gargamelle’s anus/
vagina is blocked. Gargantua travels through his
mother’s body and is eventually born through her
left ear, revealing the female body to be a series
of previously unknown passageways, whose
meaning and function are successfully deci-
phered by the male child. M. A. Screech inter-
prets this unusual birth as a means of challenging
the reader’s belief in the Christian Nativity story.
Although greeted with laughter from Grandgou-
sier, Gargamelle’s remark that she regrets not
cutting off his penis to avoid the pain of child-
birth demonstrates the perceived threat to mas-
culinity posed by the pregnant woman. In this
light, Gargamelle’s marginalization from Gar-
gantua’s education can be read as a restoration
of patriarchy. When Gargamelle’s death is an-
nounced to Grandgousier later in the work, he
responds by expressing his lack of interest in her
and all other women.
Readings: Françoise Charpentier, “Un royaume qui
perdure sans femmes,” Rabelais’s Incomparable
Book: Essays on his Art, ed. Raymond La Charité
(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Jefferson
Humphries, “The Rabelaisian Matrice,” RR 76.3
(1985): 251–70; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1979).
Pollie Bromilow
GARGANTUA The story of the father of Pan-
tagruel, covering the earliest period in the fic-
tional chronology of Rabelais’s giant princes.
The publication date (1534–35) is unsure, but
Gargantua certainly appeared after Pantagruel
(1532–33). Like Pantagruel, it exploits charac-
ters borrowed from the anonymous Grandes et
inestimables cronicques, rather undistinguished
comic tales about giants.
Gargantua 91
Gargantua falls roughly into five parts: pre-
liminaries (“Aux lecteurs,” prologue, chaps. 1–
2); Gargantua’s birth and early childhood (3–
13); Gargantua’s education (14–24); war against
Picrochole (25–51); and Abbaye de Thélème
(52–58). There is no overall plot; rather, we have
simply an episodic, chronological account of
Gargantua’s deeds. The interpretation of the
book is disputed. Some maintain that it is essen-
tially of aesthetic interest or primarily an inter-
pretational challenge. Others hold that it has a
substantial message, but they often disagree
about what the message is. One can at least say
that Gargantua raises topics such as education,
religion, and war, while it also highlights the
reader’s role as interpreter (see Reading).
The preliminaries center on the “Prologe de
l’Auteur.” The title-page calls the author Alco-
frybas Nasier, a pseudonym of François Rabe-
lais. However, the author or (more accurately)
narrator in the prologue is so idiosyncratic that
he becomes a character in his own right, not
merely a spokesman for Rabelais. He hails his
readers as drunks and syphilitics. This greeting
invites the reader to imagine himself in a kind of
drunken familiarity with Alcofrybas. Alcofrybas
also contradicts himself: for example, he claims
first that his book contains “horrific mysteries,”
but later that it is just trifles. Clearly, the narrator
is unreliable, and the reader must think for him-
self.
The first issue is precisely whether to take the
book seriously. Alcofrybas raises the question in-
sistently in the prologue. He concedes that the
title suggests a light work (like the Cronicques)
but offers three analogies that imply seriousness:
he compares Gargantua first to the philosopher
Socrates, whose wisdom contrasted with his
clownish exterior; then to a bone, from which the
reader, like a dog, should extract marrow; and
finally to ancient literary works, which were pa-
gan but in which devout sixteenth-century read-
ers nonetheless saw allegories that foreshadowed
Christianity (see Allegory). The first analogy is
plausible: like Socrates, Alcofrybas acts the
clown, and like Socrates, he could have some-
thing profound to say. On the other hand, Alcof-
rybas casts doubt on his own third analogy by
declaring that, though credulous readers may de-
tect hidden meanings in Gargantua, he did not
92 Gargantua
knowingly include any! Although scholars de-
bate the precise implications of these analogies,
two points seem clear. First, in promising serious
content, Alcofrybas indicates a reality: some
chapters do treat serious matters straightfor-
wardly (e.g., justifications for war [1, 46]). Sec-
ond, in suggesting that the book is a puzzle, he
indicates another reality: some chapters may or
may not be about serious matters, but certainly
set the reader a problem to solve (e.g., the mean-
ing of the enigma [58]).
Gargantua is born during a feast, which con-
tinues the merry tone of the prologue. More re-
markably, his mother’s pregnancy lasts eleven
months, and he is born through her ear. Alcof-
rybas maintains that long gestation befits a future
hero. The birth itself, he claims, is no odder than
that of many others; and besides, if God so
willed, it would be so. Allusion to God’s power
could be part of a polemic against conservative
theologians, outright blasphemy, or a harmless
joke. Whatever one’s view, clearly Alcofrybas
continues the tantalizing, challenging vein of the
prologue: having acknowledged that readers may
doubt the reality of this birth, he adds dismissi-
vely: “If you don’t believe it, I don’t care.” The
account of Gargantua’s early childhood partly
stresses his alleged intelligence. Thus, experi-
mentation shows him how pleasurable it is to
wipe his behind with a gosling. This insight so
impresses Grandgousier that he decides to have
Gargantua educated.
Grandgousier entrusts Gargantua first to theo-
logians who, in fifty years, make Gargantua ut-
terly stupid and idle. Grandgousier then places
him with humanist teachers, under whose guid-
ance he swiftly masters classical literature, mod-
ern Latin writing, botany (or pharmacy), and
other subjects. He also acquires physical strength
and dexterity, particularly in martial exercises.
This transmutation of the character comes not
only from intensive teaching, but also from Gar-
gantua’s own motivation: he is introduced to
learned people, wishes to hold his own, and so
acquires the urge to study. The extreme contrasts
between clerical and humanist education make
this a conspicuously satirical part of the work.
Gargantua’s studies are interrupted when King
Picrochole invades Grandgousier’s kingdom. The
immediate cause of war, a brawl about cakes, is
part of a satire on warmongers. This section in-
cludes discussion of the value of peace (as sought
by Grandgousier), of just war and of the reasons
why, in practice, unjustified wars occur. The text
ascribes these last mainly to the moral failings of
rulers, while stressing that Christian princes’
waging wars of conquest against each other is
utterly scandalous. However, the text indicates
that Picrochole himself has become mad and thus
impervious to ordinary restraints. The possibility
of such rogue princes implies that peace is a dif-
ficult ideal to realize. Some scholars prefer a
more specific interpretation, identifying Picro-
chole as a caricature of the emperor Charles V,
the rival of France, and treating the Picrocholine
war as propaganda. The war also introduces the
character Frère Jean, a monk and bloodthirsty
fighter. Although the massacres which he per-
petrates are comic, it is paradoxical that the
peace-loving Grandgousier prizes his services.
Perhaps the paradox simply reflects the reality of
a world where there are kings like Picrochole,
wars occur, and even peaceable rulers need pug-
nacious servants. Frère Jean is also a vehicle for
religious satire, for he is presented as both a typ-
ical and an atypical monk: typically, he is
drunken, greedy, and lecherous; atypically, he is
active and useful.
After the war, Grandgousier rewards his fol-
lowers. The Abbey of Thélème is founded osten-
sibly for Frère Jean, but Gargantua plans this in-
stitution. Only nominally an abbey, it is a utopia
where rich, cultivated men and women live in
harmony. The harmony comes not from rules im-
posed on the inmates, as in a monastic house, but
from the Thélémites’ internal sense of “hon-
neur,” which is partly innate, partly due to edu-
cation and social influence. “Honneur” is also
sustained by Christianity, for the inhabitants have
individual chapels, and preachers are welcome in
Thélème. Harmony is not, however, the last
word. Under the abbey is discovered an obscure
poem, whose meaning Frère Jean and Gargantua
debate (58) (see Enigmatic Prophecy). The
monk thinks it a comically mysterious descrip-
tion of tennis. For Gargantua, it evokes the per-
secutions that Christians must endure on earth.
His interpretation recalls that Thélème is an ideal
and that reality can be brutally different. Frère
Jean’s reading, however, recalls the Alcofrybas

of the prologue: as he dismissed the Christian-
izing of ancient texts, so too the monk dismisses
the possibility of “grave allegories” in the poem.
The work ends, as it began, by inviting the reader
to make up his own mind—but, this time about
a text which, in the religious intolerance of the
1530s, may relate to matters of life and death.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’œuvre de François
Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous
la Renaissance, trans. André Robel (Paris: Gallimard,
1970); Guy Demerson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Eu-
rope 757 (1992): 67–79; Jerome Schwartz, Irony and
Ideology in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1979); Olivier Zegna-Rata,
“L’acheminement vers la parole, ou l’éducation de
Gargantua,” ER 30 (1995): 7–29.
Ian R. Morrison
GARGANTUA Giant featured in the Gargan-
tuan Chronicles, and believed by many to have
folkloric origins, who appears as the title char-
acter’s father and the voice of patriarchy in Ra-
belais’s Pantagruel (1532) and as the youthful
protagonist, son of Grandgousier, in its prequel
Gargantua (1534). Gargantua frequently is
viewed as a progressive figure, because he laughs
and embraces the future rather than mourning his
wife’s death in Pantagruel 3, and as a model
and champion of the new learning, by reason of
his own humanistic education and the ambitious
curriculum he sets forth for his son (P 8). He
nonetheless exhibits retrogressive tendencies that
have elicited a good deal of critical attention in
recent years. Mentioned first in Pantagruel’s ge-
nealogy (P 1) with the likes of Grandgousier,
Atlas, Polyphemus, and Fierabras, the king of
Utopia figures in the Pantagruel and Third Book
as the conservative antipode of his son’s upstart
companion, Panurge, thereby generating a ten-
sion between old and new, legitimacy and ille-
gitimacy, imitation and invention.
Ancient, larger than life, pedigreed, lawful,
and godly, in contrast to the thirty-five-year-old
Panurge’s dubious origins, medium stature, un-
abashed lechery, and thieving ways, Gargantua
appears at first to embrace progress in his famous
letter on learning (P 8), which Rabelais inserts
strategically just prior to the introduction of Pan-
urge in chapter 9. Upon closer inspection, how-
Gargantua 93
ever, the Utopian patriarch who once strapped
Pantagruel to his cradle seems less bent on fos-
tering independence in his child than on ensuring
the continuation of his own values. Despite Gar-
gantua’s forward-looking assertion that even
“brigands” and “henchmen” know more than the
“doctors” and “preachers” of his own era, he
characterizes his son not in terms of progress or
newness but rather as his “own visible image in
the world,” “a mirror” perpetuating the sameness
of the father. Although Gargantua authorizes
Pantagruel to embark on humanistic studies and
become an “abyss of knowledge,” a trail that he
himself has already blazed, he forbids the pursuit
of knowledge through illegitimate means such as
astrology, urges his son to eschew unsavory
companions who might lead him astray, and in-
structs him to return home and defend the pat-
rimony whenever it is threatened.
True, Gargantua as a youth was scatologically
inclined and played his own share of pranks, in-
cluding stealing the bells of Notre Dame and uri-
nating on the people of Paris, both of which
might suggest a kinship with Panurge and an ef-
fort on Rabelais’s part to enliven his occasionally
stodgy patriarch. Born through the ear of his
gluttonous mother, however, Gargantua—whose
name, we are told, means “what a big throat you
have”—develops through trial and error into a
wise and temperate youth governed primarily,
like Minerva, by the upper bodily strata. In keep-
ing with the advice he gives his son in Panta-
gruel 8, young Gargantua returns home after
sowing his wild oats, defends the patrimony, and
emulates Grandgousier’s temperate style of gov-
ernance (“unwilling . . . to degenerate from the
hereditary mildness and clemency of my parents”
[G 50]) in his speech to the vanquished, effec-
tively mirroring the words and will of his wise
and generous father. Indeed, one might even ar-
gue that the Abbey of Thélème, Gargantua’s gift
to Frère Jean, replicates Utopia in its institu-
tionalization of fair play, in the respect for others
evident in all facets of the cloister’s organization
and operation, and in the likemindedness of the
abbey’s virtuous and educated residents.
In contrast, Panurge whets Pantagruel’s fasci-
nation with alterity or otherness, thrives on con-
flict rather than consensus, and—in his role as a
surrogate fils révolté or rebellious son—is re-
94 Gargantuan Chronicles
sponsible for distancing the Utopian prince from
his father by embroiling the young giant in his
own adventures. Following the introduction of
Panurge, Gargantua virtually disappears from the
narrative. In Pantagruel 17 he is translated into
the land of Morgan the Fairy, only to be resur-
rected in the Third Book as an authority figure to
whom the companions bow (35) and as a cau-
tionary voice warning against unorthodox prac-
tices. For example, he abjures the use of dice for
fortune telling (3BK 11); credence in the visions
of hermits (3BK 13), of which Gargantua is
leery; and unsanctioned, clandestine marriages
(3BK 36, 43, 48), used to circumvent patriarchal
control of marital alliances in the sixteenth cen-
tury.
True, the exchange of letters and gifts between
Gargantua and Pantagruel in the Fourth Book
(3–4) emphasizes the bond of affection, shared
interests and memories, mutual respect and trust,
and intellectual curiosity linking father and son
despite their differences. The Utopian king even
expresses friendship for Panurge in his missive,
which is delivered by messenger pigeon. Rabe-
lais still draws a subtle distinction between father
and son, however, in the choice of gifts he at-
tributes to each character. Although Gargantua
selects books, associated with learned culture and
patriarchal authority, as presents for his son, Pan-
tagruel opts to send alternative texts to his father:
both a tapestry that shows rather than tells the
story of Achilles, and a group of exotic animals
representing nature rather than culture that differ
markedly from what “ancient writers made them
out to be” (4BK 3).
Readings: Carla Freccero, Father Figures, Gene-
alogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Walter Stephens,
Giants in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1989).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
GARGANTUAN CHRONICLES (CHRO-
NIQUES GARGANTUINES) The term Chro-
niques gargantuines designates a series of pop-
ular tales published around 1530–40 featuring
the character Gargantua. In the prologue to
Pantagruel, narrator Alcofrybas Nasier men-
tions the first of these texts. In fact, in praising
his book’s merits, he compares it to the Great
and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Gi-
ant Gargantua (Grandes et inestimables Chron-
icques de l’enorme geant Gargantua), boasting
that “more copies have been sold by printers in
two months than Bibles are bought in nine years”
(P prol.). This anonymous work which appeared
in Lyon in 1532, shortly before Pantagruel, may
have been written by Rabelais. But if he is not
its author, he surely helped in the publication of
this work, if only by writing the table of contents,
as Mireille Huchon maintains. Several commen-
tators suggest that it was the great publishing
success of the story of the giant Gargantua that
persuaded Rabelais to continue it with stories
about his son Pantagruel.
Five main textual groups can be distinguished
among the Chroniques gargantuines: (1) the
Grandes et inestimables Cronicques du grant et
enorme geant Gargantua [ . . . ], to which the
narrator refers at the start of his book; (2) the
Vroy Gargantua [ . . . ] or Real Gargantua,
which probably appeared in 1533 and has char-
acteristics that make it very similar to Rabelai-
sian tales. (3) Quite different in tone is the Great
and Marvelous Life of the Most Powerful and
Fearsome King Gargantua (Grande et merveil-
leuse vie du trespuissant et redoubte Roy de Gar-
gantua [ . . . ]) signed by the acrostic “Francois
Girault” and published around 1530–35. Last are
two compilations: (4) the Cronicques du Roy
Gargantua [ . . . ], which merges the Grandes et
inestimables Cronicques and the Grande et mer-
veilleuse vie, and (5) the Admirable Chronicles
of the Powerful King Gargantua (Croniques ad-
mirables du puissant Roy Gargantua [ . . . ]),
very close to the Vroy Gargantua, which it re-
peats in addition to including whole chapters of
Pantagruel. The Disciple de Pantagruel, pub-
lished in 1538 or slightly later, is the terminus a
quo of this series.
In their borrowings, compilations, and succes-
sive rewritings of episodes, these counterfeit ver-
sions of chivalrous material are parodies of the
unrhymed knightly romances that had returned to
public favor in the second half of the sixteenth
century and become veritable bestsellers during
the reign of Francis I. They include characters
from the Arthurian tradition, such as Merlin the
wizard, Queen Guinevere, and Lancelot. How-
ever, with the title “chronicles,” these popular

books also evoke the tradition of the great annals
and their histories. In the comic mode, they trace
the genealogy of the hero, his marvelous birth,
his childhood, and finally his great feats of arms
and contain numerous burlesque and scatological
elements (see Scatology). The very character of
the giant Gargantua and several passages of the
Rabelaisian epics reveal themselves in fact to be
rewritings of episodes from the Chroniques gar-
gantuines. For example, the description of the
giant’s clothing, Gargantua’s trip to Paris as well
as his theft of the bells of Notre-Dame, which he
attaches to the neck of his mare, are all borrowed
from the Grandes et inestimables Cronicques du
grant et enorme geant Gargantua [ . . . ]. The
reference to the hollow tooth also suggests a pas-
sage in the Vroy Gargantua [ . . . ]. Moreover, in
the sixteenth century, the tales of Rabelais were
often printed together with the Chroniques gar-
gantuines, reflecting printing and composition
processes and an understanding of authorship
that are quite different from our modern practices
and concepts.
Readings: Les chroniques gargantuines, ed. Chris-
tiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière and Guy Demerson (Paris:
Nizet, 1988); François Cornilliat, “L’Autre géant: Les
chroniques gargantuines et leur intertexte,” Littérature
55 (1984): 85–97; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Les chro-
niques gargantuines et la parodie du chevaleresque,”
ER 32.1 (1996): 85–95; John Lewis, “Towards a Chro-
nology of the Chroniques gargantuines,” ER 18
(1985): 83–101; François Rabelais Œuvres complètes,
ed. Mireille Huchon, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
Diane Desrosiers-Bonin
GASTER, MESSERE (4BK 57–62) The Gas-
ter episode occupies chapters 57–62 of the
Fourth Book. Pantagruel and the crew of the
Thalamège descend upon an island whose sum-
mit is at the end of a steep and rocky climb. At
the peak is an earthly paradise reminiscent of the
Garden of Eden. Pantagruel identifies the place
as the Manor of Arete recalling Hesiod’s descrip-
tion in Works and Days of the plateau of virtue
accessible only through great struggle.
However, the allegory is complicated by the
appearance of “Messere Gaster” (“Signor
Belly”), the “governor” of the island and first
“master of arts” in the world. The allusion to the
Gaster, Messere 95
Belly as the ruler of virtue and the arts introduces
a troubling irony into the episode. In addition to
deflating the concept of human virtue and indus-
try, Rabelais appears to be writing a satire of
Ficinian Platonism. In his Commentary on
Plato’s Symposium, Ficino identifies Love as the
governor and ruler of the arts, while Rabelais
suggests there is no greater inspiration than the
implacable gut (Marichal 1956: 190–92).
Through Gaster, Rabelais develops a discus-
sion of the value of linguistic signs and contrasts
artificial language with brute reality. Following
Erasmus, Rabelais informs us that Gaster, the
hungry stomach, was created with no ears (Ad-
ages, II, 8, 84). Gaster cannot be deceived since
he does not hear the arguments of others. Yet he
is an imperious ruler whose own commands must
be obeyed upon penalty of death. Gaster and his
regent Penury are driving forces in nature and
society, causing birds to sing and humankind to
initiate all arts as well as the voyages of immi-
gration and discovery and many of the techno-
logical advances of the day.
Despite his many accomplishments, Gaster is
unworthy of undue glorification and himself ad-
mits to being not a god but a vile creature, send-
ing his worshipers to his chamber pot to see the
evidence of his base humanity.
At his court, Gaster is served by two cate-
gories of followers: the Engastrimythes, or
ventriloquists, and the Gastrolatres, or Belly-
worshipers. The Gastrolatres are bands of lazy
sectarians who never work, fearing to “offend”
the stomach and shrink it. Rabelais identifies
them with those whom Saint Paul in his Epistle
to the Philippians deems enemies of the cross,
explaining that the god they worship is their own
belly and that their paradise is of this world.
Reminiscent of members of religious orders, the
Gastrolatres respond to the call of a bell and ar-
range themselves in order of rank and seniority
for a procession behind the Carnival figure of
the voracious Manduce. Servants offer up “dry
toasts” and copious amounts of food and drink
to their god in a satirical representation of the
Catholic mass, which Rabelais presents as for-
malistic routine and a transformation of the Eu-
charist into an idolatrous feast (Duval, 1988:
132–34).
The vituperation of Gaster and his followers
96 Gastrolatres
continues as the stomach is presented as the
cause of the recent diabolical creation of gun-
powder. Since the seeming Manor of Virtue or
Garden of Eden proves to be a false paradise ac-
cessible only through the sweat of the brow and
devastated by the presence of warfare, Duval
sees the chapters as a retelling of the Fall and a
renunciation of the search to find any ready-made
utopia or truth, the announced goal of the voy-
ages in the Third and Fourth Books themselves
(Design 42–8). Other critics, such as Michel
Jeanneret, see Rabelais’s Gaster as an essentially
polymorphous force, brutal and devouring, yet
capable of inspiring virtuosity in humanity (22–
5). The assigning of any single or stable meaning
to these chapters is undermined by the contra-
dictions within the text itself, which is essentially
the development of a stomach-god character
based on a very literal reading of a biblical in-
junction against literal interpretation and fetish-
ism.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998);
Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cène et le voyage sans
fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–41; Michel
Jeanneret, “Les Paroles dégelées (Rabelais, Quart Li-
vre, 48–65), Littérature 17 (1965): 14–30; Robert
Marichal, “Quart livre: commentaires,” ER 1 (1956):
151–202; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1979).
Gerard Lavatori
GASTROLATRES This episode consists of
four distinct parts: a detailed presentation of the
island’s topography (4BK 57); a description of
its inhabitants, the Gastrolatres and Engastrimy-
thes (4BK 58); a summary of their religious rit-
uals (4BK 59–60); and finally an account of Gas-
ter’s many “inventions” (4BK 61–62). Because
of the central role played by allegory, the Gas-
trolatres episode has served as a centerpiece in
scholarly debate on interpretation itself hinging
on questions of allegory, ambivalence, and insta-
bility.
As “Belly-worshipers,” (Briefve Déclaration)
the Gastrolatres cultivate an elaborate gastron-
omy described in detail (4BK 59–60) that takes
the episode well beyond a simple condemnation
of gluttony. Because they are also described as
being idle and living together in close-knit so-
cieties, the Gastrolatres have been interpreted as
a parody of monks. Finally, this same idleness,
combined with their association with poverty,
uselessness, and the cockleshell motif (used by
pilgrims as well as by itinerant paupers), suggests
that the Gastrolatres are also informed by social
discourse on pauperism. Indeed, the Lyon of Ra-
belais’s time was the site of one of the Renais-
sance’s public works projects with accompany-
ing rhetoric condemning “idle” paupers.
Beyond this satire, critics have identified a re-
ligious subtext to the Gastrolatres episode. Most
of Rabelais’s attention is indeed accorded to their
most obvious trait, their extravagant idolatry:
they considered Gaster to be a great God, wor-
shiping him as God, sacrificing to him as their
omnipotent God, and recognizing no other God
(4BK 58) while engaging in elaborate rituals to
worship him (4BK 59–60). This association of
idolatry with an extreme glorification of materi-
ality has Pauline resonances: it recalls the con-
demnation of idolatry as one of the “works of the
flesh” (Gal 5.19–21) just as chapter 58 concludes
with a quotation assimilating Belly worshipers to
the enemies of the cross (Phil. 3.18–19). For
some critics, the Pauline intertext has the func-
tion of a kind of master-source for an evangelical
humanist like Rabelais. The episode also reso-
nates with themes sounded by Reformers who,
like Paul, assimilated idolatry to the glorification
(deification) of materiality. Charging the Church
with “idolatry” was a common accusation made
by John Calvin and others.
Not only are the Gastrolatres themselves an
allegorical representation (of the belly and its
drives? of monks? of paupers? of idolaters?), but
the episode is saturated with allegory from the
initial reference to the Rock of Virtue—a con-
secrated topos from Hesiod found in contempo-
rary texts such as Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Con-
corde des deux langages (1511) and François
Habert’s Temple de Vertu (1542). The beginning
and end of the episode (4BK 57; 61–62) invite
readers to interpret Gaster and his island allegor-
ically in light of (1) the Neoplatonic conception
of love or (2) the human (postlapsarian) condi-
tion. Gaster’s epithet as “the first Master of Arts
in the world” (“Premier Maistre es Ars de ce
Monde” [4BK 67]) recalls Marsilio Ficino’s
commentary on Plato’s Symposium where love is

said to be the master of the arts. Scholars have
also seen in Gaster and his island an allegory of
humanity’s fallen state of work and violence.
Thus, Gaster’s imperial decree that all his sub-
jects work (4BK 57) echoes the Old Testament
injunction “in the sweat of your face you will eat
your bread.” This episode combines the Old Tes-
tament account of the Fall (Gen 3.17–19) with
classical imagery of the Iron Age from Hesiod
(Works and Days), Virgil (Georgics 1.129–33;
145–46), and Ovid (Metamorphosis 1.123–44).
Seen in this light, his epithet “Premier Maistre es
Ars de ce Monde” refers not only to the Neopla-
tonic conception of love, but also to the “arts and
trades” that characterize humanity’s postlapsar-
ian state of work and war (4BK 61–62).
Whether they allegorize Neoplatonic love or
the human condition, the chapters devoted to
Gaster and his inventions (4BK 61–62) are an
example of ironic encomium (satirical eulogy)
akin to Panurge’s famous Praise of Debtors
(3BK 3–4).
Readings: Terence Cave, “Reading Rabelais: Vari-
ations on the Rock of Virtue,” Literary Theory/Ren-
aissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre
de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Michel Jeanneret,
“Les paroles dégelées,” Littérature 27 (1975): 163–80;
Virginia Krause, “Idle Works in Rabelais’ Quart Li-
vre: The Case of the Gastrolatres,” SCJ 30.1 (1999):
47–60; Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart
Livre,” ER 1 (1956): 183–202; François Rigolot, Les
langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996 [1972]),
152–60.
Virginia Krause
GENEALOGIES Evoking both biblical line-
ages (Gen. 10–11, 35–36; Matt. 1.1–17) and the
vogue for encomiastic and embellished family
trees among Renaissance dignitaries, who often
claim heroes from antiquity among their ances-
tors, Rabelais’s own genealogy of the Utopian
princely family (P 1) lends itself to multiple in-
terpretations. Given the plethora of inventors
who figure in the giants’ lineage, the family tree
represents at one level a tribute to humanistic in-
genuity, enriched by a syncretic but improbable
mixture of biblical (Jewish), classical (Roman
and Greek), medieval Christian, and completely
Geography 97
fictional names. However, the specific nature of
the inventions represented, ranging from new
methods of smoking beef tongue to wine flasks
and bespectacled dice games, suggests that the
encomium is partly paradoxical or even a parody
of Renaissance panegyrical genres. Moreover, as
a celebration of patriarchy, the genealogy is gen-
tly undermined by the narrator’s own sugges-
tion that he believes nothing of what he has tran-
scribed (“si ne le croiez, non foys-je, fist-elle” P
1). Rabelais takes up the topic of ancestry again
in Gargantua, where he reveals that Gargantua’s
genealogy—presumably the one transcribed in
Pantagruel—was discovered underground in an
urn, half-eaten by rodents and inscribed with in-
visible letters that have been deciphered by a
drunken scribe named Alcofrybas (G 9). Finally,
the entire patriarchal lineage is arguably cast in
doubt by the narrator’s discussion of eleven-
month pregnancies (G 3), technically legitimate
but biologically problematic.
Readings: Edwin Duval, “Pantagruel’s Genealogy
and the Redemptive Design of Rabelais’ Pantagruel,
PMLA 99.2 (1984): 162–78; Carla Freccero, Father
Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Ra-
belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
GEOGRAPHY An important element, to dif-
fering degrees, in Rabelais’s five books. Rabe-
laisian geography reflects the multitude of ways
in which sixteenth-century writers thought about
their world, a world whose limits were expanding
beyond anything imagined by classical or medi-
eval cartographers. But it is more than “reflec-
tion”: Rabelais exploits the many narrative pos-
sibilities of this diversity, navigating the reader
through landscapes that invite interpretation,
even while refusing to yield a fixed meaning.
Sixteenth-century geography was largely de-
termined by classical and medieval texts. From
the Middle Ages, the sixteenth century inherited
vast compendia such as Vincent de Beauvais’s
Speculum (thirteenth century, printed in Stras-
bourg in 1476). The known world was described
in mappaemundi, diagrammatic world maps
blending religion, myth, and travelers’ accounts
and dotted with illustrations of fabulous people
98 Geography
and beasts (rather like Rabelais’s text), or T.O.
maps, so called because the three known conti-
nents formed a T within the circle of God’s cre-
ation. The myth of the terrestrial paradise contin-
ued during the sixteenth century and is one of
the comparisons evoked by Rabelais for the is-
land of Gaster (4BK 57).
The most influential cartographer, however,
was Ptolemy (second century a.d.), whose Ge-
ography was widely translated and printed in Eu-
rope after the first edition in 1475. Like many
Renaissance cosmographers, Petrus Apianus in
his Cosmography (1544) reproduced many of
Ptolemy’s notions, such as his three projections,
his location within a geometric coordinate sys-
tem, and his canonical distinction between local
cartography (chorography) and national or inter-
national (geography). Ptolemy’s influence was
added to medieval influences, rather than replac-
ing them immediately, and the Geography’s lim-
its were also being shown by explorers in the
Americas: Da Gama, Vespucci, Columbus,
Verrazano, Cartier, or Cortés. The “original”
maps accompanying Ptolemy’s text (which may
have been added up to the thirteenth century)
were increasingly replaced by modern maps.
As well as enabling numerous editions of old
maps and cartographic texts, the printing press
also produced an explosion in the production of
atlases, cosmographies, geographies, and travel
accounts by contemporary writers. On receipt of
travel accounts from Amerigo Vespucci, the
duke of Lorraine suspended a new edition of
Ptolemy in favor of a world map that would in-
clude contemporary discoveries. The result was
Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, the
first to show the Americas separated from Asia.
Olaus Magnus’s remarkable navigator’s map of
the northeast Atlantic (1539), deliberately in-
tended to improve upon Ptolemy, was widely
used by cartographers all over Europe and was
known by Rabelais, who uses Olaus as the in-
spiration for his mention of Lapland (3BK 51)
and perhaps for the incident of the physetere
(4BK 33). Ptolemy’s authority started to decline
toward the end of the sixteenth century, with the
influence of Sebastien Münster’s epoque-making
Cosmography (1544), Mercator’s world map
(1554), and the publication of new and more up-
to-date atlases, in particular Ortelius’s Theater of
the World (1570), considered the first modern at-
las.
Travel accounts also proliferate at this time.
Jacques Cartier’s accounts of his first two voy-
ages to Canada (1534, 1535-36), published in
1545, were certainly known by Rabelais. The
itinerary of the travelers in the Fourth Book re-
calls Cartier’s first voyage and the search for the
fabled northwest passage (4BK 1), as do various
other details, for example, the gift of the knife to
queen Niphleseth (4BK 42) and the cannon fire
that frightens Panurge (4BK 66). However, re-
cent criticism has challenged too direct a calqu-
ing of the voyages of the Fourth Book onto Car-
tier’s Brief Account. Although Cartier’s text is
rather sober in its descriptions, other travel ac-
counts revel in the “marvelous diversity” of the
world: for example, Simon Grynaeus’s New
Globe (1532, French translation the same year)
and Joannes Boemus, The Customs, Laws and
Rites of All Peoples (1536, French translation
1549), both collections of travel narratives, some
imaginary. However, travelers often included
hearsay in their accounts, blending direct obser-
vation with old legends: Rabelais comments on
this with his personage Ouy-Dire (5BK 30), who
gives lectures to cosmographers, explorers, and
natural historians.
Accounts of entirely fictitious and fantastic
flora and fauna also enjoyed credibility, confirm-
ing the old notion that the far corners of the
world were inhabited by monsters: André
Thevet, Singularities of Antarctic France (1557).
Rabelais’s fourth and fifth books are imprinted
with these narratives of singularities. Recent crit-
icism has also shown the importance of the “in-
sular,” or atlas of islands, to Rabelais’s narrative
structure in these books, arguing that the episodic
structure of travel from island to island gives rise
to an almost limitless narrative and thematic di-
versity.
Nor was there any lack of maps or accounts
of travel within Europe or France. Sebastien
Münster’s new maps for his edition of Ptolemy
(1540) marked a revolution in the mapping of
Europe. In France, the Church often took the in-
itiative in local mapping or chorography, while
the first large-scale map of France was contained
in Orance Fine’s New Description of the Whole
of France (1525). The mapping of the nation

contributed to France’s sense of itself as a terri-
tory distinct from others and to increased mobil-
ity within the country. In Rabelais, the image of
France is that of a nation both expanding out-
ward and opening up within. Recent criticism has
shown the importance of non-French “others” in
Rabelais’s exploration of the psychic and geo-
graphical limits of French identity. And changes
within France, the formation of new communi-
cation networks often prompted by increased
trade, are suggested by the episode on the Ile
d’Odes in the Fifth Book (5BK 25) where the
roads “go” places; that is, they literally move
from one place to another, like rivers.
Another descriptive tradition still very much
alive was that of the Guides for pilgrims and
other travelers. These early travel guides started
mainly as information on the distances between
stages on a particular route and were gradually
embellished with local history, anecdotes, and
the like. Many were concerned with nomencla-
ture and stories of how a particular place got its
name. This etymological interest is marked in
Claude Champier and Gilles Corrozet’s 1537
Catalogue of French towns and landmarks, and
particularly in Charles Estienne’s famous guide
to sixteenth-century France, Guide to the Roads
of France (1552). Rabelais’s French geography
in the first two books explores the narrative pos-
sibilities of such relationships between name,
place, and history, for example, the naming of
the forest of Beauce (G 16); and Pantagruel in
the Fourth Book expounds on the occult causal
relationships between places and their names
(4BK 37). Pantagruel’s tour of French universi-
ties blends local history, actuality, nomenclature,
geography, and imagination. The dolmen near
Poitiers, the “raised stone” (P 5), was and still is
an actual landmark, which Rabelais repositions
within his own particular geography and history.
The France that emerges from the giant’s tour is
thus a liminal space between reality and fantasy,
or one subject to many discursive determinants,
that is still in the process of being defined.
In all of Rabelais’s books landscapes are al-
ternately recognizable and strange. The voyage
to Utopia in Pantagruel (P 24) starts on an itin-
erary that exactly matches that taken by the Por-
tuguese toward the Indies, but then progresses to
places such as Mèden (“Nothing”). The Island of
Geography 99
Gaster (4BK 57) evokes the traditions of the
Rock of Virtue and the earthly paradise, but is
also compared to Mount Aiguille in Vercors,
south of Grenoble. The suspension of landscape
between realism and imagination is expressed by
Panurge in a small incident on the Ile Bossard in
the Fifth Book (5BK 4). Having heard the name
of the island, Panurge thinks that his interlocutor
Editue meant to say “the Ile Bouchard,” the name
of a village near Chinon. Editue corrects him,
insisting that the name of the place is indeed Ile
Bossard.
Sometimes, landscapes or landmarks are con-
structed out of linguistic puzzles, games, and de-
bates. The environmental history of the Beauce
region, dry and unable to sustain a forest since
antiquity, is rewritten by Rabelais (G 16) and
named with a pun (“beau ce”). The travelers of
the Fifth Book are taken to task on their pronun-
ciation of “Entéléchie,” the name of the kingdom
in which they have arrived (OC 5BK 18; GP
5BK 19). They pass the test, since they do not
say “Endéléchie,” as other uneducated travelers
have done. This refers to a contemporary hu-
manist debate about the difference between the
two words in Greek, a debate that had nothing
to do with place names. The relationship between
the human and the nonhuman world, or between
microcosm and macrocosm, subtends many of
Rabelais’s landscapes: the mappemonde that
Frère Jean sees in Panurge’s beard (3BK 28)
literally embodies the known world (without the
Americas, apparently).
Many Rabelaisian landscapes ultimately affirm
the creative power of the author over his narra-
tive space. Nowhere is this more evident than in
the world within Pantagruel’s mouth (P 32),
which the narrator explores as a New World and
where the body of the author’s creation, Panta-
gruel, coterminous with the “body” of his text,
literally becomes its own world. Rabelais often
brings the narrative and the reader back to his
native Touraine, providing very specific refer-
ences to small villages, woods, territories, fords,
and so on, near his family’s land at La Devinière
near Chinon. In fact, La Devinière seems to be
the general quarters of the Picrocholine War.
This war, based on a historical local quarrel be-
tween the seigneur of Lerné and the users of the
Loire River, a dispute in which Rabelais’s own
100 Giants
father was involved, reads like a chorography of
the Touraine: the local landscape is ravaged by
the enemy troops, the castle of La Roche Cler-
maud is taken, the Abbey of Seuilly is attacked,
and the Gué de Vède becomes pivotal strategic
territory (G 26–28, 34). Thélème is built on the
Loire River (G 52); one critic has located it quite
precisely between the Loire and Indre.
Toward the end of the Fifth Book, arriving at
the oracle after peregrinations through strange
and marvelous lands, the narrator brings the
reader back to the author’s territory, comparing
the paintings to those in a cellar in Chinon (OC
5BK 34; GP 5BK 35). Chinon is described as the
“first city in the world”: through a false etymol-
ogy (Caynon) linking the name with Cain’s ori-
ginary murder, the narrator inscribes the town
into the beginnings of biblical history and also
sends us back to the beginning of Pantagruel (P
1), where Abel’s blood enriches the soil and pro-
duces the nèfles or medlars, at the origin of Ra-
belais’s gigantic mythology. The entire narrative,
then, is framed by Chinon, the text mapping out
a landscape that refers back to the place of origin
of the author himself—an author who makes sure
that we never quite know where we are.
Readings: Numa Broc, La géographie à la Renais-
sance (1420–1620) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale,
1980); François de Dainville, La géographie des
humanistes (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940); Timothy
Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Cen-
tury: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 2001); Abel Lefranc, Les navi-
gations de Pantagruel, étude sur la géographie
rabelaisienne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967,
1905); Frank Lestringant, “Eléments pour une lecture
topographique du Cinquiesme Livre,” ER 40 (2001):
81–102; Frank Lestringant, Le livre des ı̂les. Atlas et
récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva:
Droz, 2002); Frank Lestringant, Ecrire le monde à la
Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993); Robert Mari-
chal, “Commentaires du Quart livre,” ER 1 (1956):
153–58, 181–88; V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais: Rabelais
dans son enquête, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983); Ga-
briel Spillebout, “Le réalisme chinonais,” ER 21
(1988): 69–75.
Louisa Mackenzie
GIANTS “Giant,” “Rabelaisian,” and “Gar-
gantuan” are synonyms in several languages. Ex-
aggeration and the gigantic pervade Rabelais’s
early fiction and saturate his language even after
Pantagruel, Gargantua, and Grandgousier
cease to be consistently portrayed as giants. Be-
fore Rabelais, both serious and facetious culture
discussed giants. Gargantua was the name of a
gigantic hero in cheaply printed tall tales peddled
at fairs, known collectively to modern scholars
as the Chroniques gargantuines, or Gargantuan
Chronicles. Rabelais’s narratorial alter ego, Al-
cofrybas Nasier, praises one such book in the
prologue to Pantagruel, and alludes to it several
times in Gargantua as well. Nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century scholars documented ref-
erences to Gargantua in the oral culture of French
peasants and speculated that the giant had origi-
nated in prehistoric Celtic mythology, perhaps as
a god. Anthropologists investigated “town gi-
ants,” large effigies of founders and other cultural
heroes paraded in French civic pageants from the
late Middle Ages into modern times. The Russian
critic Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted this entire
body of speculation as evidence of a durable
“carnivalesque” popular culture, which ex-
ploited scatology and sexuality to degrade and
“uncrown” the repressive “official” culture of the
medieval Church and affirm the people’s fearless
outlook through laughter.
Medieval Scandinavian folklore, which Rabe-
lais would not have known, told of giants. In
Rabelais’s time, comparable evidence of truly
oral French folklore about giants was not re-
corded; only the Chroniques gargantuines, sur-
viving in few copies, are clearly datable to Ra-
belais’s era, and, aside from their written format,
they show literate influences (e.g., Arthurian ro-
mances). Giants were massively present in offi-
cial or scholarly culture of Rabelais’s time, how-
ever. Described in the Hebrew Bible or “Old
Testament,” they were a standard topic of ancient
and universal history. Christian preachers based
sermons and parables for all audiences on erudite
biblical commentaries; saints’ lives also told of
giants, particularly the legendary convert and
martyr Saint Christopher. Greek and Latin my-
thology recounted how giants and titans had re-
belled against the gods of Olympus. Since an-
tiquity, Jewish and Christian authors had
defended the historical existence of Giants, iden-

tifying pagan myths about them as deformed ech-
oes of biblical truth.
The giants of scholarly culture differed radi-
cally from those of Rabelais, from the hero of
the Chroniques gargantuines, and from the “pop-
ular” giants of modern scholarly speculation.
Biblical and classical giants were evil, not good,
ignorant and savage, not civilized or civilizable;
and they were extinct, precisely because of their
evil nature. Until Saint Augustine (354–430),
many writers defined giants on the basis of Gen.
6:4, which declared that there had been “Giants
in the earth in those days,” before Noah’s Flood,
that their birth had been caused by miscegenation
or racial mixing between the “sons of God” and
the “daughters of men,” and that Noah’s Flood
was sent partly to punish their atrocities. Some
writers identified the “sons of God” as fallen an-
gels, giving Giants a semidemonic genealogy;
several Christian writers disputed this idea, in-
terpreting the “sons of God” as descendants of
Adam’s son Seth and the “daughters of men” as
Cain’s posterity. After Augustine, the Sethian ex-
planation prevailed, despite Augustine’s denial
that giants were a discrete race. Augustine’s idea
that giants were simply deviations from the ge-
netic norm obviated the necessity of explaining
how angels could have fallen a second time, long
after the fall of man, and why, if God sent the
Flood to destroy a race of giants, they had reap-
peared in the time of Moses and David.
Aside from a few giants who converted to
Christianity, like Saint Christopher and some gi-
ants in medieval French and Renaissance Italian
heroic poems, there were no good giants in of-
ficial culture until 1498, when Annius of Viterbo
(Giovanni Nanni, 1432–1502) published a col-
lection of forged chronicles attributed to ancient
Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Latin
authors. Skillfully coordinating his bogus texts
and commentaries with histories written by au-
thoritative ancients like Flavius Josephus, Pliny
the Elder, and Diodorus Siculus, as well as the
Book of Genesis, Annius predisposed his readers
to conclude that Noah’s family had been anom-
alous good giants before the Flood and that Noah
had founded an Etruscan empire in postdiluvian
Italy, becoming the first pontifex maximus, pre-
figuring the Papacy, and establishing an admin-
istrative center at Rome. Thus the Pope had in-
Giants 101
herited both spiritual and secular power over the
entire world. Noah invented all civilization, from
bread and wine (prefiguring the Eucharist) to
laws, letters, and culture.
Annius’s forgeries had no success in Italy until
the Medici Grand Duchy. But by 1509, Jean Le-
maire de Belges was busily erasing Annius’s
Etruscans and supplanting them with the Gallic
Celts. Lemaire skillfully reforged Annius in Les
Illustrations de Gaule et singularités de Troie
(1511–13), founding a school of patriotic French
pseudohistory that served monarchs from Louis
XII to Louis XIII. Lemaire coordinated his Gallic
antiquities with earlier medieval myths that Tro-
jan refugees founded France and other kingdoms.
He depicted an eternal French hegemony, claim-
ing that Charlemagne, Louis XII, and all French
monarchs inherited the cultural preeminence and
universal empire of the good Giant, Noah.
Rabelais’s giants burlesque all these bodies of
giant-lore. Like Louis XII and his successors,
Pantagruel and Gargantua trace their genealogy
“depuis l’Arche de Noé jusqu’ à cet âge” (from
Noah’s Ark down to our own times). They are
anomalous giants, staggeringly good and pious,
superhumanly erudite. Pantagruel’s herb Panta-
gruelion rivals Noah’s vine for beneficence.
Thus, when the prologue to Pantagruel praised
readers for accepting the egregious lies of the
Chroniques gargantuines like “true believers,”
many could recognize Lemaire’s and Annius’s
pretensions to “Gospel truth” historiography.
Rabelais’s other giants are the evil monsters of
traditional folkloric and scholarly consensus.
Loup Garou and his hordes, even the comical
Bringuenarilles (4BK 17), are enemies of hu-
man life and civilization. By setting good and
evil giants in conflict, Rabelais indulged his love
of exaggeration while mocking the sophistry of
pseudoscholarly nationalistic writers.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Abel Lefranc, Rabelais: Etudes sur Gar-
gantua, Pantagruel, Le Tiers livre, Introd. by Robert
Marichal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Walter Ste-
phens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient His-
tory, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1989).
Walter Stephens
102 Golden Age
GOLDEN AGE In Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
the Golden Age, presided over by Saturn, was
marked by abundance and the absence of both
private property and conflict among men. First
evoked in Pantagruel 31 in reference to the rees-
tablishment of peace following Anarche’s de-
feat, the image is developed at greater length in
chapter 4 of the Third Book when a world char-
acterized by mutual debt and the unfettered cir-
culation of material goods is described as a
“Golden Age and reign of Saturn.” Taking into
account the irony in Panurge’s substitution of
material debt for caritas as the sine qua non of
an ordered society, both references support Du-
val’s reading of Rabelais’s works as manuals for
good government by an enlightened Christian
monarch.
In chapter 8 of the Third Book, the Golden
Age is implicated in Rabelais’s conflation of sex-
uality and problems of interpretation. When
Panurge asserts that Nature created man with un-
protected genitalia as a mark of chosen status and
that codpieces are a sign of the Age of Iron, his
image of husk and seed echoes traditional exe-
getical language. Although Rabelais’s most di-
rect source is Erasmus’s “Dulce bellum inex-
pertis” (Adagia 4.1.1), references to Erasmus or
Ovid do not fully account for the passage’s
comic tone, its substitution of reproduction for
caritas as the highest goal of human existence,
or its reference to allegorical language. However,
Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la Rose
(c. 1280; printed through 1538) discusses the
Golden Age and its end in the specific context
of economics and marital jealousy (8317–9648,
13845–86) and uses the castration of Saturn as a
metaphor for the separation of sign and meaning
(5505–11; 6898–7154).
Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Tiers Livre de Pantagruel’(Geneva: Droz, 1997); Jen-
nifer Monahan, “Reading the Rose in the Early Ren-
aissance,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at
Berkeley, 2000).
Jennifer Monahan
GRACE AND FREE WILL In a Christian
context, grace is defined as the divine gift of un-
merited salvation, while free will (liberum arbi-
trium, libre arbitre) denotes an individual’s un-
constrained ability to accept or reject the saving
message of the Gospel. Controversies opposing
freedom of the will to doctrines such as the bond-
age of the will (servum arbitrium, serf arbitre),
the total depravity of human nature, salvation by
grace alone, determinism, and predestination
have flared up at various times throughout his-
tory and still continue to divide Protestant, Ro-
man Catholic, and Orthodox Christians. At issue
is the extent to which human beings in their
fallen state can, in effect, “take the first step”
toward faith before receiving the gift of divine
grace and then cooperate (synergos) with God in
earning their own salvation.
The major scriptural source of the controversy
is Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which em-
phasizes the impossibility of attaining salvation
through human effort: “The just shall live by
faith” (1.17), “A man is justified by faith without
the deeds of the law” (3.28), and so on. The Epis-
tle of Saint James, however, seems to offer an-
other vision of salvation: “Even so faith, if it hath
not works, is dead, being alone” (2.17), or “Ye
see then how that by works a man is justified,
and not by faith only” (2.24). It was Augustine
of Hippo’s emphasis on the corruption of human
nature which determined the position of Western
Christianity for over a millennium.
Rabelais would have become familiar with
these issues because Luther’s rereading of Paul
and Augustine launched the Protestant Refor-
mation. In addition, Erasmus and Luther en-
gaged in a bitter polemical exchange opposing
the freedom of the will to the bondage of the
will. As usual, one should not expect from Ra-
belais a coherent, systematic defense of one po-
sition or the other, given the extremely subtle
theological concepts involved and the vernacular
genre that he had chosen as the vehicle for ex-
pressing himself. Indeed, his attitudes seem to
oscillate between optimistic and pessimistic vi-
sions of human nature.
Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel
all express their confidence in the value of relig-
ious and secular educational reform as a means
of restraining individual aggression and reform-
ing European society. The way of life adopted
by the Thélémites (G 51–57) is generally cited
as proof that Rabelais had taken the side of the
“optimistic” Erasmus against Luther, “the pessi-
mist”: “Their lives were not ordered and gov-

erned by laws and statutes and rules, but accord-
ing to their own free will” (“Toute leur vie estoit
employée non par loix, statuz ou reigles, mais
selon leur vouloir et franc arbitre” [GP 124; G
57]). The motto, “Do what you will” (“Fay ce
que vouldras”) seems to indicate a large measure
of confidence in human potential for choosing
good over evil. Finally, the principles of Pan-
tagruelisme (3BK 2) offer a means of intelli-
gently cultivating human happiness.
Rabelais often evokes the catastrophic poten-
tial of humanity’s franc arbitre. When describing
Picrochole’s “oultraiges” and “cholere tyran-
nique,” Grandgousier laments that “our eternal
Lord has consigned Picrochole to the commands
of his own free will, his own sense of what is
right and just, and . . . he can only continue in his
wicked ways because he is not continually
guided by God’s good grace” (G 29). Elsewhere,
humanity is depicted as utterly worthless without
God’s active help: “Isn’t it simply a recognition
of our one and only source of everything worth
having? Isn’t it simply to declare that we all of
us depend on His kindness, that without Him
there is nothing, nothing is worth anything, noth-
ing can happen, if His holy grace isn’t instilled
in us?” (GP 322; 3BK 30).
The dark side of the human condition plays an
increasingly important role in Rabelais’s last two
books. In spite of his numerous gifts, Panurge
has fallen totally under the power of “the evil
spirit” (l’esprit maling [3BK 7, 19]). And while
the consultations with various “experts” are cer-
tainly amusing, they also reveal the inability of
human beings to find any real certainty if left to
their own devices. Finally, the voyage through
the archipelago of the Fourth Book reveals a
succession of creatures intent upon inventing rea-
sons to hate and, ideally, destroy their neighbors,
thereby confirming for some readers the univer-
sal depravity of human beings (and Andouilles).
Readings: Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Chris-
tendom (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1969); Edmund
J. Campion, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Read-
ers of Erasmus (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
1995); Erasmus, De libero arbitrio (1524) and Luther,
De servo arbitrio (1525), in Luther and Erasmus: Free
Will and Salvation, trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip
S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969)
and Erasmus. Luther. Discourse on Free Will, ed.
Gross Medlars 103
Ernst Winter (New York: Continuum, 2002); Harry J.
McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong? An Ecumenical
Theological Study of Luther’s Major Work, “The
Bondage of the Will” (New York: Newman Press,
1969).
William H. Huseman
GRANDGOUSIER Devoted husband to Gar-
gamelle and proud father of the great Gargan-
tua, so named by Grandgousier himself when ut-
tering his first words to the newborn in
astonishment over the impressive size of his
mouth and the volume of his voice when de-
manding a drink (G 7). A caring, affectionate
father, Grandgousier attempts to provide the best
for his son in all areas, selecting with care the
colors and quality of clothing, toys and tutors.
Later, during the Picrocholine conflict, Grandg-
ousier stands out as a model of pacifism and di-
plomacy. Before entering war, he attempts to
soften Picrochole’s ire by sending an ambassa-
dor and responding to accusations of theft by of-
fering a shipment of bread (fouaces) as restitu-
tion (G 31–32). When war can no longer be
avoided, Grandgousier reluctantly participates,
treating prisoners such as Tocquedillon with jus-
tice and kindness, going even so far as to give
Tocquedillon a beautiful sword upon his release
(G 46). Grandgousier’s philosophy and manner
of living in all things positively influence Gar-
gantua to become fair and kind in turn, and to
pass on Grandgousier’s legacy of wise living to
his own son, Pantagruel.
Readings: Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Gene-
alogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Lesa Randall
GROSS MEDLARS (P 1) Literally and figu-
ratively, this seemingly banal fruit represents the
source and origin of the Chronicques pantagrué-
lines. The narrator tells us that the blood spilled
by Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel—the year
of which is determined by the Druid, that is, pa-
gan, way of measuring time—had rendered the
soil so fertile as to create an abundance of fruit,
particularly said medlars. That year was hence-
forth known as the “year of the gross medlars.”
Anyone eating that invigorating fruit experienced
curious swelling of body parts, and some even
104 Grotesque Realism
turned into giants, which created the race from
which Gargantua and Pantagruel descended.
The importance of the “mixture” seems even
consciously inscribed in the choice of the French
term mesles (medlar) instead of the regular nèfle
as well as in the utter temporal and cosmological
confusion that marks the “year of the gross med-
lars,” culminating in the “week of the three
Thursdays” in “October or September,” which
sees the sun and the moon deviating from their
respective courses. Paradoxically enough, as is
often the case in Rabelais, such disturbing fac-
tors, incorporated into this burlesque rewriting of
the Fall, are nullified by the positive result: the
creation of the race of the giants. After all, they
are responsible for saving Noah’s Ark, and now—
in the Christlike figure of Pantagruel, as has been
argued—they have returned to redeem human-
kind once again. In this context, we must not
forget that they are the product of the exact op-
posite of the barrenness that followed the biblical
account of the fratricide; the ensuing upheaval
and confusion could thus be seen to represent a
symbol of revolt against received truths with
Pantagruel as a cleansing force. This ingenious
blending and rewriting of biblical (Genesis) and
pagan history, of realism and fantasy (Jean Le-
maire de Belges’s Illustrations de Gaule has
been mentioned as a likely target) sets the tone
for the entire text.
One should not forget the adjective “gross,”
however, which does not merely indicate the ef-
fect of fertility but also seems to connote the type
of raw, farcical mixture that this first chronicle
will offer. The medlars therefore become the de-
fining element of the book’s narrative structure
as well and end up dominating a text that mixes,
often crudely, humanist learning with farce, often
of an utterly obscene and vulgar nature. In the
Third Book, as the giants’ physical qualities all
but disappear, so do the farce and the “gross
mixture” of the preceding chronicles. Any ob-
scenity or vulgarity will henceforth be expressed
in a more subtle fashion. The gross medlars have
finally given way to a more refined concoction.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1991); Peter Gilman and Abraham C. Keller,
“The ‘Grosses Mesles’,” ER 29 (1993); Raymond C.
La Charité, “Closure and the Reign of the ‘grosses
mesles’ in Rabelais’s Pantagruel,” Parcours et ren-
contres. Mélanges de langue, d’histoire et de littéra-
ture françaises offerts à Enea Balmas, vol. 1, ed. Pa-
olo Carile et al. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993); Marcel
Tetel, “Genèse d’une œuvre: Le premier chapitre du
Pantagruel,” Stanford French Review 3 (1979): 41–
52.
Bernd Renner
GROTESQUE REALISM In Mikhail Bakh-
tin the grotesque realism of medieval and Ren-
aissance popular culture is intimately linked to
the representation of the body. According to this
aesthetic, the body, through a topographical dis-
placement from high to low in which the organs
of reproduction and excretion take precedence
over other anatomical parts such as the head, is
constantly represented in its materiality and its
biological functions: birth, alimentation, diges-
tion, defecation, micturition, childbirth, decom-
position, and so on. This insistence on the lower
bodily strata tends to create a fragmented and
incomplete image of the body, highlighting the
openings and protuberances that constitute en-
tries into and exits from this grotesque anatomi-
cal form, which is undifferentiated rather than
individualized. In this so-called collective body,
according to the popular cyclical scheme of time
based on agriculture, putrefaction is synonymous
with the new life to come, for matter is called
upon to recycle itself indefinitely. According to
Bakhtin, scatology and sauciness in Rabelais’s
work are manifestations of grotesque realism re-
flecting the author’s implicit support for a certain
kind of materialism. Thus the emblem of the an-
drogyne given to Gargantua at his birth (G 8)
evokes bicorporality, since the two parts of the
original being constitute a type of “beast with
two backs.” Further, Panurge’s Praise of Cod-
pieces (3BK 8) is really a tribute to the material
immortality of the grotesque body, the celebra-
tion of the “vivid sensation each person has of
belonging to the immortal ‘people,’ creators of
history.”
Quite perceptively, Bakhtin emphasizes the
term grotesque or crotesque, which appears to
have been coined—but with a different mean-
ing—in the Renaissance. The word even appears
in Rabelais’s work (3BK 26 and 5BK 40). In

fact, the adjective first appeared in Italian to des-
ignate the rich and fanciful wall decoration of the
Domus Aurea of Nero, rediscovered during the
archaeological excavations of the fifteenth cen-
tury. The term derives from the substantive
grotto, because the famous House of Gold, be-
fore being completely unearthed, was first taken
for a kind of cave. According to the Tresor de
la langue française, the first appearance of the
term dates from 1532, which constitutes an ex-
traordinary coincidence: for the first famous
work of Rabelais, the Pantagruel, dates from ex-
actly the same year.
Nonetheless, this grotesque realism rests upon
a postulate that is at the base of Bakhtin’s inter-
pretation. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais is both
an atheist and the partisan of a materialist con-
ception of the world that is closely related to the
rationalism of Padua, a hypothesis that Lucien
Febvre’s work formally refuted. Moreover, it is
impossible to disregard the platonic background
in the emblem of the androgyne, which evokes
the union of the body and soul. Similarly, in the
case of the Praise of Codpieces, it is difficult to
ignore the reaction of Pantagruel, who contends
that the encomium sets forth a “very paradoxical
doctrine” (“doctrine moult paradoxe”), as well as
the fact that for the doctors of the era, including
Rabelais, spermatogenesis in the testicles was
considered an error of Galen, because the sper-
matozoids were believed to be produced in the
heart and only stored in the scrotum.
In reality, the representation of the grotesque
body in Rabelais may be explained by the reha-
bilitation of the body in the Renaissance, which,
even as its dignity was restored, remains subor-
Grotesque Realism 105
dinate to the mind and soul. Furthermore, gro-
tesque elements in the Gallic physician’s text
doubtless relate to the fact that Rabelais, accord-
ing to the Fifth Book prologue, views himself as
a “riparographe,” that is to say, as a painter of
vile and earthy things. This aesthetic of the ri-
parographe approaches the negative theology of
Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, according to
which man, unable to know God, must settle for
evoking what he is not. Given the reorientation
of the discourse from God toward man that is
effected by humanism, however, Rabelais’s aes-
thetic of riparography does not represent a neg-
ative theology, but rather a negative “homology”
in the sense of a discourse on man. And because
man, as defined by Pico della Mirandola in his
Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hom-
inis dignitate), is pure potential, one cannot say
what he is, but only what he is not. Thus, even
if man is a material body who eats, digests, def-
ecates, and copulates, this is only a part of who
and what he is. His ontological truth is elsewhere
and elusive, but grotesque realism suggests it by
default.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’œuvre de François
Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous
la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel (1970; Paris: Gal-
limard, coll. “Tel,” 1994); Jean Céard, “Le fantastique
d’en deça,” Magazine littéraire 319 (1994): 49–51;
Claude La Charité, “Panurge est-il ‘thalamite’ ou thé-
lémite? Le style de petit ‘riparographe’: l’apologue
sans morale de l’âne et du roussin,” Actes du colloque
international de Rome: Rabelais le Cinquiesme livre,
ed. Franco Giacone, ER 40 (Geneva: Droz, 2001):
455–66.
Claude La Charité
 H
HAUGHTY PARISIAN LADY (HAULTE
DAME DE PARIS) (P 21–22) In an infamous
chapter in the Pantagruel, Rabelais stages the
humiliation of a Parisian noblewoman at the
hands of the hero Pantagruel’s newly acquired
best friend, Panurge (P 21–22, TLF 13–14).
This episode has been the subject of much mod-
ern debate over the question of Rabelais’s atti-
tudes toward women: was the writer a misogy-
nist, or does this episode belong to the
Bakhtinian spirit of Carnival in the undoing of
traditional medieval hierarchies of caste? Might
it instead be a reflection on the character of Pan-
urge, the decidedly antiheroic alter ego of the
near perfect princely giant Pantagruel? As in all
of Rabelais’s work, the difficulty lies in part in
a reader’s ability to situate the position of the
author and determine the reliability of the nar-
rator in this dialogic, polyvocal text. Panurge, a
lover of practical jokes, finds himself locally fa-
mous in Paris for having defeated an English-
man in a debate by signs (P 20). This success
goes to his head, and he endeavors to “venir au
dessus” (to conquer, but literally to come on top
of, or to top) a Parisian noblewoman. She spurns
him, whereupon he resorts to flattery, obscene
wordplay, bribery, and force—all to no avail.
That night, on the eve of a holy feast day when
all the ladies dress splendidly for church, Pan-
urge finds a bitch in heat, kills her, takes an un-
specified part of her, chops it up, and makes of
it a kind of drug, which he then finds occasion,
the next day, to sprinkle on the lady. This causes
all the dogs of Paris (the text specifies more than
six hundred) to be drawn to her and to piss on
her. Panurge invites Pantagruel to observe the
spectacle, which he does with admiration and en-
joyment.
As Wayne Booth famously observed (“Free-
dom of Interpretation”), this episode was tradi-
tionally read as funny, a practical joke played on
a woman to humiliate her for her haughtiness in
spurning the lower-class suitor. However, with
the advent of feminist literary criticism, Booth
goes on to say, the episode gives us pause, for
whereas a class analysis makes of this reversal
of fortune an occasion for triumphant laughter,
an analysis that takes the gendered relation be-
tween the parties into account turns the event into
a kind of sexual assault by proxy. Indeed, the
very beginning of the chapter, in conjunction
with what the reader already knows about the
character of Panurge, suggests that it is the will
to dominate, rather than to seduce, that is at issue
for Panurge. As in the encounter between the
Englishman Thaumaste and Panurge, this
exchange takes the form of a lively repartee—
verbal rather than nonverbal—between the suitor
and the lady who is the object of his affections.
And the lady, remarkably, holds her own, al-
though the third-person narrator of the scene
insinuates from time to time that her stated re-
solve is not as firm as it may seem.
Thus, in a combination parody of two genres,
courtly love and the medieval pastourelle (a de-
bate cum sexual assault often taking place be-
tween a knight and a humble shepherdess), Ra-
belais both critiques and restages the double bind
of early modern sexual politics. On the one hand,
if the lady refuses—which she must also abso-
lutely do—she is haughty and hypocritical; on
the other, if the knight woos, he must absolutely
win, or risk the dignity of his position. That Pan-
urge enacts his revenge on the lady through the
agency of dogs—and commits the murder of a
bitch in heat to do so—demystifies the motives
of seduction, revealing the barely concealed vi-
olence beneath the rhetoric of courtliness. The
substitution of dogs for his person further sug-
gests a failure at the heart of Panurge’s mascu-
 Hebrew Language and Culture, References to
linity, a failure that must, inevitably, result in vis-
iting humiliation on the object of failed conquest.
Is the episode of the haughty lady of Paris
funny? As is always the case, the answer is, it
depends. As a parodic tour de force intellectually
unveiling the motives of courtly love, on the one
hand, and with equal verve, colloquially invok-
ing the comparison between men and dogs on the
other, yes, the episode is funny. As a familiar
portrait of sexual assault by proxy and the hom-
osocial bonding produced at the expense of
women, no, it is not. But the marvel in this in-
stance is that, between laughter and horror, the
episode’s complexity gives us pause, for we are
able to read both messages—misogynist and
feminist—in the intricacy of Rabelais’s text.
Readings: Wayne Booth, “Freedom of Interpreta-
tion: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criti-
cism,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 45–76; Carla Frec-
cero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the
‘Haulte dame de Paris’ (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15
(1985): 57–67; Carla Freccero, “The ‘Instance’ of the
Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” Rabelais’s
Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond
C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).
Carla Freccero
HEBREW LANGUAGE AND CULTURE,
REFERENCES TO The many Hebrew and
Judaic elements to be found in Rabelais’s books
reflect the recent linguistic and metaphysic inter-
est for the study of Hebrew prevalent among hu-
manists in Europe in the sixteenth century. This
novel infatuation with Hebrew is best understood
when the theological climate of the time is kept
in mind. It was a time of spiritual and intellectual
renewal. In this period of definition that was to
lead to the Reformation of the Catholic Church,
dogmas were reexamined, thanks to the labor of
printing and translating done by humanists such
as Erasmus or Lefèvre d’Etaples. Christian He-
braists translated and studied the texts of the
kabbala, and by giving these mystical Jewish
texts a Neoplatonic twist, found perspectives that
corroborated some of the Christian dogmas. In
that period of openness and optimism of the early
part of the sixteenth century, Francis I commis-
sioned Jean Thenaud’s Traité de Cabale and
established the Collège de Lecteurs Royaux,
107
where Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the three noble
languages, were taught.
Besides the fascination for the kabbala, there
was great interest in the Hebrew language itself,
which was thought to be a purer, pre-babelian
language, more sacred and ancient than Greek
and Latin. It was a language inspired by God.
Whoever knew Hebrew could understand the
world and the correspondences that ruled crea-
tion.
In this spirit, the letter written by Gargantua
to Pantagruel (P 8) exhorts the young prince,
not once but three times, to study Hebrew and
Chaldean, and to read the Talmudist and kabbal-
ist texts. This eloquent admonishment is even-
tually concretized in the Hebraic Library of Thé-
lème.
Rabelais’s own lifelong interest in Hebrew is
apparent in the borrowings from Hebrew to be
found in each of his epic stories. The books are
rich in Hebrew terms and in allusions to the Mas-
soretic work, the lexicon and grammar side of
the Jewish sacred texts. True Hebrew words, of
biblical origin, enrich the text. Such is the tirade
of Panurge begging for a loaf of bread: “Adoni
scholom lecha: im ischar harob hal habdeca, be-
meherah thithen li kikar lehem, cham cathub:
laah al Adonai chonen ral” (P 9). This word-for-
word translation informs the reader of Rabelais’s
proficiency in Hebrew. Other examples of Ra-
belais’s playfulness with Hebrew are interspersed
here and there. Among other things, eight islands
have a name that is either Hebrew or Hebraici-
zed: Ennasin, Cheli, Tohu, Bohu, Farouche,
Ruach, Chaneph, and Ganabin. The name of-
fers generally a linguistic picture of the island:
thus, Ruach, island of the wind, Ganabin, island
of the thieves, and so on. A few, such as Cheli,
Ruach, Tohu, Bohu, and Belima, are instances of
kabbalistic keys with double meaning. Ruach, for
example, is both “wind” and “spirit,” and lends
itself to esoteric interpretation. Testimony to its
author’s predilection for Hebraic sonority, the
text also boasts creations that are only an echo
of true Hebrew words and pure phonic formu-
lations: such are Chalbroth, Sarabroth, Fari-
broth, the litany of giants in Gargantua’s gene-
alogy. This ending in-oth imitates the Hebrew
mark of feminine plural. On that pattern, Rabe-
lais created many words that have a Hebraic fla-
108 Hell, Depiction of
vor: falbroth, enthoth, broth, dechoth, endoth,
moth, voldemoth, diavoloth, doth. Yet others
have a masculine resonance: barildim, elmim, en-
souim, alkatim, nim, mnarbothim. A form like
Ennasin, coined on the pattern of the island of
Ganabin, is actually a hybrid form of the French
(en)naz, grafted on an Hebraic suffix. The form
P.N.T.G.R.L. is a counterfeit of Hebraic writing
in its consonantal form; that is, it is not vocalized
by the Massoretic system. Finally, let’s note that
Hebrew is a good cover for a few malicious ob-
scenities: Thacor are hemorrhoids; Farouche, a
corruption of Pheresh, is the island of excrement.
The eighty some words that are, or sound as
if they are, Hebrew, convince the reader of the
author’s affinity for the mother tongue. Many of
the words point to the character of Moses, who
is in turn in Rabelais’s fiction a solemn and
proud figure, a valiant captain (4BK ded.), an
inspiring political leader (4BK 37), a mystical
master (4BK 56), a philosopher and writer (3BK
8; 4BK 33), or a rigorous legislator (3BK 7, 16;
4BK 49).
Readings: Katia Campbell, “Notes sur l’hébreu de
Rabelais: La rencontre avec Panurge (Pantagruel,
chap. 9),” ER 25 (1991): 95–105; Marie Holban, “Au-
tour de Jean Thenaud et de Frère Jean des Enton-
neurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65; David Morris, “The Place
of Jewish Law and Tradition in the Work of François
Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); François Secret, Les Kab-
balistes chrétiens à la Renaissance (Paris: Dunod,
1964).
Katia Campbell
HELL, DEPICTION OF In chapter 30 of
Pantagruel, in the course of a battle between
Pantagruel’s army and the forces of the evil
Loup Garou, Pantagruel’s companion Episté-
mon dies after having his throat cut. Panurge per-
forms alchemy-cum-surgery after finding Epis-
témon lying with his bloody head in his arms.
Thus resurrected, Epistémon describes his stay
“en enfer” and in the “Champs Elisées” (OC 322).
Below the ground, Epistémon encounters a
mix of historical and legendary figures from clas-
sical, Christian, and specifically French cultures,
including Alexander the Great, Themistocles,
Aeneas, Odysseus, Octavian, Huon de Bordeaux,
Lancelot du Lac, Pierre Pathelin, and several
mostly Renaissance popes. As Mireille Huchon
points out, the inhabitants of Rabelais’s under-
world vary considerably in different editions of
Pantagruel. Although most of these modifica-
tions involve additions of figures from Greco-
Roman antiquity, by 1534, “Rabelais suppressed
everything that might directly touch the French
Crown” by removing Charlemagne, Pharamond,
Pepin, and the twelve peers of France from the
scene (OC 1328). Medieval chivalric heroes with
a less sacred place in French mythology remain,
however, such as “Ogier le Dannoys,” “Jan de
Paris,” and “les quatre filz Aymon” (324).
Epistémon’s descent is not represented as part
of some larger epic design, as are Odysseus’s and
Aeneas’s trips to the underworld. Epistémon is
not the hero of Pantagruel, and his experience
here does nothing to move the main narrative
toward its climax in Pantagruel’s final victory
over Loup Garou’s forces. Moreover, unlike
Odysseus or Aeneas, Epistémon’s passage into
the underworld leaves his body behind. Episté-
mon himself summarizes the conditions in the
world below in terms that evoke the Christian
afterlife: the last (here, the philosophers) are
made first, and the mighty are made meek.
This postmortem reversal of earthly fortunes
has a well-known classical precedent in Lucian’s
Menippus, and Epistémon’s vision ultimately
bears little resemblance to medieval Christian de-
pictions of Hell. However undesirable it may
seem to spend one’s afterlife as, say, a ratcatcher,
as Pope Alexander VI is consigned to do here,
nobody suffers the harrowing torments of
Dante’s Inferno in Rabelais’s underworld. Nor,
moreover, is there any sense that the labors of
those obliged to do menial tasks in the afterlife
purge or purify the soul. Rather, the upside-down
world that Epistémon encounters appears to be
remarkable primarily for its entertainment value:
Epistémon says he is a bit sorry that Panurge
brought him back from among the damned so
quickly, “for it was singularly entertaining to see
them” (“car je prenois (dist il) un singulier pas-
setemps à les veoir” [322]).
In his groundbreaking work on religious belief
in sixteenth-century France, Lucien Febvre in-
sisted that Rabelais’s novel should not be taken
as blasphemous and that this episode in particular
should rather be read as a parody of popular texts
like the Quatre fils Aymon and the Calendrier des

bergers. More recently, Edwin Duval has devel-
oped a sustained, systematic analysis of Rabe-
lais’s work that attributes a thoroughly Christian
framework to the Pantagruel series. Thus, Epis-
témon’s focus on the sheer pleasure to be had
from observing specific figures from history and
mythology in ridiculous situations exists along-
side Pantagruel’s concern with the more abstract
question of the wages of mortal sin. “Keep these
fine stories for another time,” Pantagruel inter-
rupts his companion’s report; “Just tell us how
the usurers are treated” (326). It would, of
course, be a mistake to separate completely Ep-
istémon’s and Pantagruel’s respective approaches
to a hermeneutics of Hell; chez Rabelais, moral
reflection and good storytelling are inextricably
intertwined.
Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the
Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Be-
atrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982); Mireille Huchan, Oeuvres complètes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade se-
ries).
Andrea Frisch
HENRY II (1519–59) The second son of
Francis I and king of France from 1547 until his
death from a jousting wound in 1559. Although
little is known with certainty about Rabelais’s
dealings with the second Valois king, whose
reign began during the Gallic physician’s exile
in Metz and just prior to the publication of the
embattled 1548 edition of the Fourth Book,
there is no doubt that he actively sought the mon-
arch’s favor to offset the Sorbonne’s efforts at
censorship. In 1549, while in Italy under the
protection of Jean du Bellay, Rabelais penned La
Sciomachie in honor of the birth of Henry’s
short-lived son, Louis of Orléans; and in the ded-
ication to Odet de Coligny, cardinal of Châtillon,
that begins the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book,
the author reminds readers that the king himself,
described as virtuous and “blessed by heaven,”
has approved his writings by granting the cardi-
nal a ten-year royal privilege for their publica-
tion.
Whether Henry, better known for his athletic
prowess than his scholarly pursuits, had read the
Henry II 109
chronicles is uncertain. Clearly, however, Rabe-
lais was fortunate to have well-connected friends
willing to petition the monarch on his behalf, for
the king was by no means a partisan of intellec-
tual freedom, at least in his own country. Build-
ing upon his father’s growing opposition to the
Reform following the Affair of the Placards,
Henry launched his own crackdown on heretics
in 1547 by instituting the Chambre Ardente
(“Burning Chamber”) as a separate chamber of
Parlement. True, the French king both supported
and enlisted the aid of infidels and heretics
abroad, forming alliances with Germany’s Lu-
theran princes, English Protestants, and Turks in
opposition to fellow Catholics such as Charles
V. Apparently, Henry “had even given hope to
the German Lutherans in 1546 that he would
support the Reform” (Baumgartner 1988: 127);
and by the same token, his defiance of the papacy
over control of the French Church is not without
parallels to the English Reformation.
Henry’s willingness to join forces with non-
Catholics abroad, while jockeying for power in
Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, no doubt
results from a variety of factors, including his
particular hatred for Charles V, the old nemesis
of his father and a key player in Henry’s own
four-year imprisonment in Spain as a child; and
his opportunistic, secular approach to military
strategy and state building reminiscent of Mach-
iavelli’s prince. On the other hand, his excep-
tionally hard-line attitude toward French Reform-
ers, which seems to clash with his policies
abroad, may have stemmed in part from a sense
of guilt over his dealings with infidels and
heretics elsewhere, from the influence of conser-
vative Catholics in France including his mistress
Diane de Poitiers, his adviser Montmorency, and
the powerful Guises, or even from the formulaic
promise to stamp out heresy that figured in his
coronation oath. Most importantly, Henry viewed
religious dissent in political terms, as a threat to
the state, the crown, and his own role as head of
the Gallican Church. Far from unifying France,
strengthening the monarchy, or promoting do-
mestic tranquility in the long term, however, the
policy of repression Henry bequeathed to his son
Henry III and his wife Catherine de Medici, who
became regent upon the succession of Charles
IX, set the stage for his country’s longest and
110 Her Trippa
bloodiest civil conflict—the Wars of Religion
that effectively put an end to the brilliant French
Renaissance.
Readings: Frederic J. Baumgartner, Henry II. King
of France 1547–1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1988); Robert J. Knecht, French Renaissance
Monarchy. Francis I and Henry II, 2nd ed. (London:
Longman, 1996); Ian D. McFarlane, ed., The Entry of
Henry II into Paris 16 June 1549 (Binghamton, NY:
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
HER TRIPPA An astrologer and occultist,
one of the authorities that Panurge consults in
the Third Book (25), most often identified as a
combination of Trithemius (Steganographia) and
Cornelius Agrippa (De occulta philosophia and
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarium et ar-
tium). It is Epistémon who suggests this consul-
tation, which seems significant as Her Trippa’s
questionable methods of divination are of the
type that Pantagruel, the usual instigator of the
text’s consultations, would appear to condemn.
The astrologer presents in fact an encyclopedia
of magic erudition that completes and concludes
the series of consultations relying on divination.
We are confronted with the type of elaborate
intellectual farce that has come to represent the
text’s ironic design while evacuating (or at least
discrediting) the physical farce of the first two
books. Her Trippa is the only authority who has
already experienced what Panurge is so fright-
ened of, namely to be cuckolded, as we learn
from the trickster himself at the beginning of
the chapter. The astrologer’s ignorance of this
personal mishap casts an instant doubt on his
abilities as a soothsayer. His verdict, however,
corresponds to all the other verdicts, confirming
that Panurge will indeed be cuckolded, beaten,
and robbed by his future wife. What is more, it
is the most unequivocal verdict, leaving Panurge
without the option of reinterpreting it in his favor
as he is wont to do. In his rage the trickster un-
masks Her Trippa, first insulting him rather vi-
olently and then drawing on a number of prov-
erbs from Erasmus’s Adages, reproaching him
for his lack of self-knowledge. The criticism cul-
minates in what Panurge calls the “first charac-
teristic of philosophy,” the phrase “KNOW
THYSELF,” forming, in capital letters, the center
of the chapter and repeating, essentially, the ad-
vice that could be considered the leitmotif of all
fourteen consultations beginning with Panta-
gruel’s “Ricochet song” (3BK 9). The trickster—
combining biblical and classical sources (the par-
able from the Sermon on the Mount, which is
part of the aforementioned sequence of Adagia
as well as Plutarch’s polypragmon)—essentially
reproaches the occultist for his ability to see the
mote in others’ eyes but not the beam in his own.
Although Panurge seems correct in his quali-
fications of the prognosticator, who, blissfully ig-
norant of his own wife’s adulterous actions, is
nonetheless convinced to be able to predict an-
other man’s marital future, the irony consists in
the fact that the trickster implicitly unmasks him-
self in his ranting, as he and Her Trippa turn out
to be mirror images as models of philautia, un-
able to detect in themselves what they so easily
recognize in others. Furthermore, both of them
adhere to the illusion that univocal solutions can
be provided to inherently ambivalent problems.
In this way the trickster’s severe criticism of the
occultist proves to be a dismantling of blind ad-
herence to univocal models of thought expressed
through Panurge’s subtle unconscious self-
satirization, a technique that illustrates the Third
Book’s new brand of elaborate satire.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges
(Geneva: Droz, 1977); Edwin M. Duval, The Design
of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz,
1997); Michael A. Screech, “Girolamo Cardano’s De
Sapientia and the Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” BHR 25
(1963): 97–110.
Bernd Renner
HERESY Rabelais could easily have been
burned at the stake for his writings. All four
books were considered heretical—that is, dam-
aging to the central teachings of the Catholic
Church—and condemned by the religious au-
thorities in France immediately after they
appeared in print. The Pantagruel was reportedly
censured or at least denounced, in 1533, less than
a year after its publication in Lyon; a re-edition
of Pantagruel and Gargantua, in 1543; the
Third Book, in 1546; and the Fourth Book, in
1552, this time by both religious and civil au-
thorities—the Sorbonne and the Parlement. In
Catholic theology, no crime was more serious

than heresy, deemed tantamount to murder but
infinitely worse. A murderer ends a mortal life
before its time; a heretic, it was argued, snuffs
out the immortal life of souls by depriving them
of salvation. Spreading errors of faith and false
beliefs, the heretic kills for all eternity. Heretics
were burned at the stake not only to punish evil,
but also to purify and protect the community by
eliminating all traces of an infectious and deadly
pollution.
The modern reader of Rabelais is unlikely to
have such thoughts in mind. Rabelais, however,
was keenly aware of what was at stake in attack-
ing the Church. Not just a few but hundreds of
reform-minded Catholics in France were burned
at the stake between 1523 and 1560 (El Kenz
1997). This practice is alluded to early in Pan-
tagruel, implicitly in the famous “jusques au feu
exclusive” in the prologue (“This I maintain fully
and firmly to any point, short of the stake”), and
explicitly in chapter 5 when Pantagruel on his
tour of French universities stopped at Toulouse
“but did not stay there long when he saw that
they had their professors burnt alive like red-
herrings, [and went away] saying ‘God forbid I
should die such a death.’ ” The professor in ques-
tion, Jean de Cahors, had just been sentenced
(January 1532) to death for having made
heretical statements at a dinner. He was burned
alive on the place Saint-Etienne in Toulouse in
June, four months before Rabelais published
Pantagruel. From 1533 to his death in 1553, Ra-
belais, always on the lookout for safe havens and
protective patrons, was constantly prepared to
flee and did so (Poitou, Chambéry, Metz, Rome)
each time one of his books was condemned.
When the Sorbonne condemned the Third Book
immediately after publication in 1546, he left
France for the imperial city of Metz; in the same
year, his sometime colleague and editor in Lyon,
Etienne Dolet, convicted of heresy for having
published portions of the Bible in French, was
hanged and burned in Paris on the Place Maub-
ert. Over the next three years, from 1547 to 1550,
the Paris Parlement issued more than five hun-
dred convictions of heresy, sixty of which carried
the death penalty.
In the sixteenth century, what exactly was
meant by the term heresy? Everyone knew it
meant religious views not sanctioned by the
Heresy 111
Church; heresy was the opposite of orthodoxy.
But what was orthodoxy, at a time when so much
had changed and the Church itself spoke of re-
form? In 1543 Francis I issued a royal ordinance
enjoining “inquisitors of the faith to pursue Lu-
therans and heretics as seditious, disruptors of the
public peace, and conspirators against the secu-
rity of the State” (Isambert 818–21). But how
would an inquisitor know who was a “Lutheran,”
and what exactly was a “heretic”?
The Sorbonne provided a precise response to
these questions, included with the Ordinance of
1543. Registered in the Parlement on July 3 and
published in the streets of Paris the following
day, it contains a list of twenty-five Articles of
faith set forth by the dean and doctors of theol-
ogy of the University of Paris assembled at the
demand of the king, “in order briefly to set forth,
in written form, what faithful preachers and doc-
tors of theology must preach and read, and what
other faithful Christians must believe with the
Catholic church” (Isambert in Back 1986: 821).
The list defines orthodoxy concisely (ce qui est
à croire) as understood by the Sorbonne in 1543,
and thus defines heresy as well, by contrast and
implication in some cases, though in others,
heretical doctrines are specified explicitly. Many
of the articles are stated in the form of opposing
imperatives (it is necessary to believe X and not
Y). The Ordinance of 1543 with its Sorbonne ad-
dendum (“What is to be believed, and preached,
concerning the points which have lately fallen
into controversy concerning our Holy Faith and
Religion” [52]) carries, as a royal decree, the
highest judicial authority, and the pronounce-
ments of the Sorbonne doctors carry the highest
doctrinal authority in France. All in all, it would
be hard for the nonspecialist reader of Rabelais
to find a better introduction (or the specialist a
better summary) regarding the question of “her-
esy in the time of Rabelais.”
What is to be believed, and preached, concerning
the points which have lately fallen into controversy
concerning our Holy Faith and Religion (52).
1. It is necessary to believe, with certain and firm
Faith, that Baptism is necessary for everyone
for their Salvation, even for small children, and
that by Baptism is conferred the Grace of the
Holy Spirit.
112 Heresy
2. By like constancy and firmness of Faith, it is
to be believed that man has his unfettered and
Free Will, by which he may do Good or Evil;
and by which, even if he be in Mortal Sin, he
may, with the help of God, be restored to
Grace.
3. And it is no less certain that to those who are
of age and capable of Reason, after having
committed Mortal Sin, Penitence is necessary,
which consists in Contrition, Confession that
must be made as a Sacrament verbally to a
Priest, and in the same way Satisfaction.
4. Further, it is to be believed the sinner is in no
way justified by Faith alone, but also by his
Good Works, which are of such necessity that
without them, a man who is capable of Reason
can not obtain Eternal Life.
5. Each and every Christian is required to believe
firmly that in the act of Consecration at the
Altar, the bread and the wine are converted to
the true body and blood of Jesus Christ, and
that after the aforementioned Consecration
there remains only the form of the said bread
and wine under which is truly contained the
real Body of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin
Mary and who suffered on the rood of the
Cross.
6. The Sacrifice of the Mass is of the institution
of Jesus Christ and is useful and profitable for
the living and the dead.
7. The Communion of the Eucharist under the
two signs of bread and wine is not necessary
for the Laity, whence properly and for certain
and just reasons it has long been ordained by
the Church that the aforementioned Lay public
receive Communion only under the form of
bread.
8. And further, the power to consecrate the true
Body of Jesus Christ was given by Him only
to Priests ordained and consecrated according
to the custom and observance of the Church,
and likewise the power to absolve sins in the
sacrament of Penitence.
9. And as well, these Priests truly do consecrate,
even bad Priests or Priests in mortal sin, the
true Body of Jesus Christ, provided it is their
intention to do so.
10. Confirmation and Extreme Unction are two
Sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ, by
which is conferred the Grace of the Holy
Spirit.
11. And it must not be doubted that the Saints, as
much in this mortal life as those in Paradise,
do miracles.
12. It is a holy thing and most pleasing to God, to
pray to the blessed mother of God the Virgin
Mary, and to the Saints in heaven, that they be
advocates and intercessors for us toward God.
13. And for this reason we must not only imitate
and follow these Saints who reign with Jesus
Christ, but honor and pray to them.
14. And for this reason, those who out of devotion
visit churches and other places dedicated to
these Saints, perform holy and religious ac-
tions.
15. If perchance someone, inside or outside of
Church, begins praying directly to the glorious
Virgin Mary, or to some Saint before praying
to God, this is in no way a sin.
16. Nor must there be any doubt that it is indeed
a Good Work to kneel before an image, either
of the crucifix or the Virgin Mary or the other
Saints, to pray to our Lord Jesus Christ and to
the Saints.
17. Further, it is necessary to believe firmly and in
no way to doubt, that there is a Purgatory, in
which the souls there detained are aided by
prayers, fasting, alms, and other Good Works,
so that they be the more speedily delivered
from their pains.
18. Each and every Christian is required to believe
firmly that there is on Earth one universal vis-
ible Church, which cannot err in matters of
Faith and Morals, and which all Christians
must obey in matters of Faith and Morals.
19. And that if anything in the Holy Scriptures
came into controversy or doubt, that it belongs
to this Church to define and determine these
matters.
20. It is equally certain that one must believe many
things that are not expressly and specifically
contained in the Holy Scriptures, things which
must nonetheless be accepted by the tradition
of the Church.
21. By the same certainty of Truth it is necessary
to believe that the power of Excommunication
is by divine right granted without mediation by
Jesus Christ to the Church, and that for this
reason ecclesiastic censures are greatly to be
feared.
22. It is equally certain that a General Council con-
voked in due and legitimate fashion and rep-
resenting the universal Church, cannot err in

determining matters pertaining to Faith and
Morals.
23. And it is no less certain that by divine right
there is a Pope, who is chief Sovereign in the
militant church of Jesus Christ, and that all
Christians must obey him, who has the power
as well to confer Indulgences.
24. The Constitutions of the Church, such as fast-
ing, avoidance of meat, abstinence of the flesh,
among several other things, do truly oblige the
Conscience, in particular to eschew all scandal.
25. Vows and especially monastic and religious
ones, like perpetual abstinence, poverty, and
obedience, are obligations of Conscience.
From two basic principles that were generally ac-
cepted, divine grace and salvation, flowed a se-
ries of bitterly contested issues: free will and pre-
destination, justification (by faith alone or by
faith and good works), the sacraments (their role,
how they were to be observed, but first of all
their number and definition—one of the thorniest
questions being that of the real presence of the
body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist). These
are followed at more remote levels of eschato-
logical and ecclesiological controversy by “con-
stitutions,” observances, doctrines, and dogmas—
the mass, Purgatory, cult of the Virgin and
Saints, status of images, fasting, religious orders,
ultimate and infallible authority of (and in) the
Church, authority of the Pope vis-à-vis the coun-
cils (including the power of the Pope to dispense
indulgences, added seemingly almost as an af-
terthought in no. 23). All these issues were in-
terrelated, complex, fiercely disputed, and in var-
ying degrees mocked or occasionally defended
by Rabelais.
The list covers most of the litigious points
contested by Reformers of the various confes-
sional leanings hinted at behind the scenes of Ra-
belais’s comedy and satire—évangélisme, Lu-
theranism, Calvinism, and others—confronting
the corrupt traditionalism and militant ignorance
that dominated the Church and resisted all at-
tempts at eliminating abuses. It was against the
Church that Rabelais directed his most powerful
and riskiest attacks.
Readings: David El Kenz, Les buchers du roi. La
culture protestante des martyrs 1523–1572 (Seyssel:
Champ Vallon, 1997); François Isambert, Recueil gé-
Hero 113
néral des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 12 (Paris:
Plon, 1822–33) in Jonathan Beck, Théâtre et propa-
gande aux débuts de la Réforme. Six pièces polé-
miques du recueil La Vallière (Paris/Geneva: Slatkine,
1986).
Jonathan Beck
HERO Rabelais’s first two books are clearly
structured as parodies of the epic poems and leg-
ends of antiquity and of the medieval chansons
de geste and chivalric romances. Allusions to
legendary figures of the past appear throughout
the narrative, and nearly all pagan, biblical, and
medieval heroes (and villains) are either lumped
together in an incongruous genealogy (P 1), con-
demned to a degrading common fate aux Enfers
(P 30), or relegated to the Island of the Ma-
craeons (4BK 25–28). Very few contemporary
readers would question the use of the term mock-
heroic epic as an accurate description of Panta-
gruel and Gargantua, since nearly all of the ma-
jor characteristics of the original models are
present: the hero inherits a prestigious genealogy;
precocious displays of courage, strength, or
intelligence are observed during childhood; his
education or apprenticeship is exceptionally
rapid and foretells future greatness; faithful com-
panions are attracted by his obvious valor and
worth; various initiatory trials test his fitness for
the supreme challenges of warfare and single
combat; and if he is victorious, legitimate polit-
ical order is restored, or a new order is founded,
preparing the way for the future growth of a great
dynasty, city, or empire. Even death in battle
leads to apotheosis and legendary status.
Although the last two books are not structured
according to this model, they do contain epic-
heroic elements. The first chapter of the Third
Book describes how a truly heroic victor should
govern a newly conquered territory, while the
next four chapters expose the demented reason-
ing of the increasingly tyrannical antihero, Pan-
urge. Both the consultations of the Third Book
and the “odyssey” of the Fourth Book recall the
extraordinary voyages and encounters of classi-
cal and medieval adventurers.
Rabelais’s depiction of the hero, however, sys-
tematically calls into question the definition and
value of the concept, as many references are ir-
reverent and disrespectful. Panurge tells Panta-
114 Héroët, Antoine
gruel that he has “more force in [his] teeth and
more brains in [his]ass than Hercules ever had in
his whole body and soul” (P 29; GP 219); vir-
tually all classical and medieval heroes are hu-
miliated in the underworld by “philosophers and
those who had been indigent in this world” (P
30); kings are disparaged as “coquins” and
“veaulx”; Gargantua’s ideal torche-cul or arse-
wipe generates pleasure greater than “the bliss of
all the heroes and demigods, out there on the
Elysian Fields” (G 13).
But many other examples paint a darker pic-
ture. According to Pantagruel (3BK 1), those
consecrated by history as “heroes” had all too
often been insatiable “Demovores” (“devourers
of people”). Although Alexander and Hercules
are praised as examples of wisdom and restraint
after their victories, they are also found in
Grandgousier’s pantheon of antiquated models
whose example Picrochole, Anarche, and many
others have, unfortunately, chosen to follow: “To
imitate the ancients in that way—Hercules, Al-
exander, Hannibal, Scipio, and the Caesars and
all the others—is directly contrary to what the
Bible teaches us. We are each of us ordered to
protect and save and rule and administer our
lands, not angrily to invade the others” (G 46;
GP 105). Fortunately, however, Gargantua and
Pantagruel incarnate a new type of hero, the uto-
pian philosopher king guided by the principles of
Erasmian humanism.
Readings: Elizabeth Chesney, The Countervoyage
of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of
Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1982); Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Ra-
belais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz,
1992); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folk-
lore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Marcel Tetel,
“Mock Epic in Rabelais,” Neophilologus, 59 (1975):
157–64.
William H. Huseman
HÉROËT, ANTOINE (1492?–1568?) Poet
and Neoplatonist, also known as La Maison
Neuve. Little is known of Héroët’s life before
1524 when he became a pensioner of Margue-
rite de Navarre. The queen must have been
pleased with the young poet for he is enrolled as
a “pensionnaire extraordinaire” from 1529 until
1539, just after his appointment in 1538 to four
benefices. One of these was his nomination as
abbot of Cercanceaux. Héroët seems to have
taken his ecclesiastical duties seriously and was
named to three additional offices between 1544
and 1552, including the bishopric of Digne. Such
signs of royal favor would imply an active life
at court, but no records indicate that Héroët took
any part in the religious or political questions of
the day.
When Héroët started writing is uncertain. In
1531 he wrote an Epitaph for Louise de Savoy
in which he expresses ideas about immortality
that M. A. Screech believes are echoed by Ra-
belais the next year in Gargantua’s letter to
Pantagruel. Five years later, Héroët presented
Francis with the Androgyne de Platon, a French
interpretation of Marsilis Ficino’s commentary
on Plato’s Symposium. Héroët is primarily re-
membered, however, for his immensely popular,
poetic exposition of the Platonic doctrine of love
in La parfaicte amye published in 1542. Al-
though Héroët’s renown as a poet is underscored
by praise from Clément Marot, Gaucher de
Sainte-Marthe, Thomas Sebillet, Pierre de Ron-
sard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jacques Peletier du
Mans among others, he wrote nothing more after
1542.
The great success of La parfaicte amye was
due in part to the role it played in the Querelle
des Femmes as an answer to La Borderie’s mi-
sogynistic Amye de court which appeared earlier
the same year. Panurge’s marriage question in
the Third and Fourth Books seems, at least in
part, to be Rabelais’s response to the debate.
Rabelais lists Drouet (or Héroët) among the
model authors cited in the prologue to the Fifth
Book.
Readings: Jules Arnoux, Un précurseur de Ron-
sard: Antoine Héroët, néo-platonicien et poète (Digne:
Chaspoul, 1912); Antoine Héroët, La parfaicte amye,
ed. crit. Christine Hill ( Exeter: University of Exeter,
1981); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage
(London: Arnold, 1958); Raphaël Valéry, “Qui était
Antoine Héroët?” Bulletin d’art et d’histoire de la val-
lée du Loing, 5 (2002): 147–58.
Megan Conway
HIEROGLYPHS Shortly after Gargamelle
gives birth to her son, Grandgousier, her portly

husband, and the baby’s father, names the infant
Gargantua. He then orders artisans to bejewel
and dress the child sumptuously in blue and
white, the colors of his own livery. In the ninth
chapter of Gargantua, the chronicler Alcofrybas
explains why blue and white were chosen. Thus
begins a complex reflection on the tension be-
tween the “arbitrary” or “motivated” nature of
language that recalls Plato’s Cratylus and antic-
ipates Ferdinand de Saussure’s pronouncements
on the “nature of the linguistic sign.” Why is it
that blue is “naturally” given to color celestial
things and white to signify “joy, pleasure, de-
lights, and rejoicing?” (G 9). Alcofrybas invokes
a work titled the Blazon of Colors to venture an
answer, but wonders if he ought admire either its
presumption or its stupidity: presumption, for de-
siring to impose one meaning upon each and
every color, “a habit of tyrants, who prefer their
will to take the place of reason, and not wise or
learned people, who please their readers with
their reasons” (G 9); stupidity, for estimating that
for want of valid arguments “the world would
regulate its devices” (G 9) (or mottoes) by im-
posing silly allegations that turn them into re-
buses.
Unlike the “vainglorious” blazoners of his
own era, says Alcofrybas, the wise Egyptians of
Antiquity “wrote letters that they called hiero-
glyphs.” Informed readers could discern “the vir-
tue, property, and nature of the things that were
figured by [the symbols]” (G 9). The Egyptian
magus Horapollo (4th century a.d.), whose work
was translated into Greek in 1505, wrote exten-
sively about the properties of hieroglyphs, the
narrator adds, as did “Poliphile, in his Dream of
Love” (Francesco Colonna’s Dream of Polyphi-
lus). Recently published in Italy (1499) and cel-
ebrated in France for reason of its exquisite
woodcuts in sumptuous typography, Colonna’s
work binds enigma, aura, and erotic delight in a
spiritual journey of self-discovery.
For Rabelais the hieroglyph would be an ide-
ogram, a piece of writing understood through
both its referent (via the indexical function of
itself as sign) and its own form (via its own fig-
ural design). It would aim at an abstraction, a
reflection of higher essence than its own material
substance. It would be of divine language be-
cause it gives way to greater secrets concerning
Hieroglyphs 115
the nature of the world. It would be a writing
that signifies new forms as much as it transcribes
a meaning.
Yet in the paragraph above the rebus, what
Rabelais has just castigated cannot be detached
entirely from the hieroglyph. The narrator takes
pleasure in enumerating the devices he loathes.
“Homonyms” that cause images to speak silently
or be an embodiment of their name are foolishly
motivated signs. When a sphere (sphere) is an
icon for hope (espoir); bird feathers (peines) sig-
nify hardships (peines); a broken bench (un banc
rompu) bankruptcy (banque roupte); “no” and an
iron corselet (a chain of mail) for non durhabit
(“not a hard garment,” with the bonus of a Latin
pun on “[he] does not have a hard member”); a
bed without a baldachin (lit sans ciel) a licensed
person (licencié), and so forth: Alcofrybas de-
lights in calling the devices “so inept, so taste-
less, so rustic and barbaric” that a “foxtail ought
to be tied to the collar and a mask of cow ma-
nure” molded to the faces of those “who
hereafter want to use them in France after the
restitution of good letters” (21). He proceeds to
list six racier samples.
Where the hieroglyph is an arcane and sacred
writing signifying a higher meaning of abstrac-
tion and reason, the rebus (or device) pulls lan-
guage earthward, into its own materiality and
comic obscenity. In either case printed writing is
shown to be not merely what transcribes speech.
It is not, as Jacques Derrida would argue, prone
to “logocentrism.” The shape and form of writing
require the reader to see and to decipher meaning
along two autonomous tracks: voice, on the one
hand, that the signs approximate, and that cannot
avoid homonymy; visual figures, on the other,
that may or may not be related to what is being
indicated by the writing.
Whence the narrator’s critique of the Blason
des couleurs: it discourages creative work on the
part of readers who can read in different ways
and who can detect or even invent secrets in
printed language through creative scrutiny. Such
is the reader of hieroglyphs, a reader who aspires
to an art of language that is also the hieroglyph
of Gargantua. The chapter on colors and livery
becomes a dialogic poetics: its conflicted relation
with the device and hieroglyph shows how Ra-
belais’s work can be treated in its multivalent and
116 Hippocrates
creative potential (or pot-en-ciel). The exposition
is a skeleton key to Rabelais’s writing. It shows,
too, that the restitution of the language of the
gods is equivalent to procreation and generation
of new forms.
Readings: Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin,
Rebus de la Renaissance: Des images qui parlent, 2
vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984); François
Rigolot, “Cratylism and Pantagruelism,” Le texte de la
Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1982).
Tom Conley
HIPPOCRATES (c. 460–c. 377 B.C.) Widely
considered the father of medicine, Hippocrates
received training as a member of the guild known
as the Asclepiadae (fifth century b.c.) and wrote
prolifically. Rabelais meditated on numerous
Hippocratic texts in his own course of study and
later published translated editions of three others:
Les aphorismes, La nature de l’homme, and Le
régime des maladies aiguës. As a medical stu-
dent and subsequently a practicing doctor in
Lyon, Rabelais relied heavily on Hippocratic in-
ventions, such as the theory of humors and the
notion that maintenance of balance within the hu-
man body was the best means of remaining in
good health. As an author, our doctor pays direct
homage to Hippocrates in the form of twelve ci-
tations in the first four books, but the Greek doc-
tor’s importance to Rabelaisian literary invention
goes much deeper still. Hippocratic thought is at
the very root of the fantastic allegories. With the
pen Rabelais pursues and enhances his medical
practice according to a main Hippocratic tenet
which posits that the effectiveness of a doctor
and his practice of medicine depends on the de-
gree to which he is able to relate to his patient,
to cajole, to reassure, and most importantly, to
entertain him, thereby assuring the presence of a
positive state of mind—a prerequisite to any
cure, if not a powerful cure itself. It is thus that
the véroléz et goutteux (syphilitics and gouty) to
whom Alcofrybas addresses his prologues are
promised improvement of their condition if they
partake of his texts—through the powerful pill
of laughter.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles
Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin,
1988).
Lesa Randall
HIPPOTHADÉE (3BK 30) A theologian con-
sulted by Panurge in the Third Book. Panurge
wishes to marry, but because he is aging and has
himself seduced many other men’s wives, he
fears cuckoldry in his turn. Alternately moved
by wish and fear, he cannot decide for himself,
and much of the book concerns attempts to re-
solve his perplexity. After several failed attempts
to divine what Panurge’s matrimonial fate will in
fact be, Pantagruel arranges for him to take ad-
vice from experts, the theologian Hippothadée, a
doctor, and a philosopher. Hippothadée’s dia-
logue with Panurge is interesting partly for his
views on marriage and partly for Panurge’s re-
actions.
The Third Book is sometimes very hostile to
theologians. The prologue reviles them generally
as evil, hair-splitting pedants. However, Panta-
gruel calls Hippothadée a good theologian, seek-
ing to uphold the true faith by his actions and
teachings (29), and thus accords considerable au-
thority to his advice. The outlook he reveals may
be called broadly “évangélique,” that is, it im-
plies a form of Christianity centered on the Bible
and the individual’s conscience. Although the
évangéliques or evangelicals tended therefore to
attach reduced importance to the priesthood and
the traditions of the Church, they remained Ro-
man Catholics. Unlike the Protestants, they
sought simply to reform the Church moderately
from within. The personal portrait of Hippo-
thadée is appealing. He speaks modestly, and
when Panurge rejects his advice, he does not take
offense but instead explains his meaning at
length and in conciliatory terms (30). Experts
have identified him with various historical fig-
ures, most plausibly the liberal Lutheran, Philipp
Melanchthon (Schwarzerd). If correct, this iden-
tification suggests a considerable degree of per-
sonal respect for Melanchthon. (It appears that
Melanchthon, though a follower of the schis-
matic Martin Luther, was generally esteemed
by French évangéliques.)
Panurge puts his doubts to Hippothadée in two
stages (30). First he asks, “Should I marry?” In-
itially, Hippothadée advises him to seek the an-

swer within himself, as it is a matter of self-
knowledge; Panurge has received and discounted
such advice several times already. Hippothadée’s
second answer is to advocate marriage in pref-
erence to unmarried lust, “for it is far better to
marry than to burn in the fire of lust.” The ex-
pression “far better” implies quite a positive view
of marriage, compared with the grudging ap-
proval current among contemporary theologians,
Protestant as well as Catholic. (Hippothadée
does, however, warn against uxoriousness. He
cites approvingly the advice of Saint Paul: “Let
those who are married be as though not mar-
ried.”)
Happy with the advice to marry, Panurge puts
his other question to the theologian: “Shall I be
cuckolded?” Hippothadée replies that he will not,
“God willing.” This latter clause is in fact central
to his outlook. For him, the formula conveys that
without God man has no being, worth, or power.
And it expresses the point, directly relevant to
Panurge’s question, that the success of every hu-
man undertaking depends on God’s will: “All
that we propose [depends] on the dispositions of
His holy will.” For Panurge, this response con-
demns him anew to the uncertainty he has been
seeking to escape: he feels that only if he could
discover the “privy counsel of God,” that is, scru-
tinize the unfathomable secrets of Providence,
could he be reassured. But Hippothadée main-
tains that God, through Scripture, does reveal his
will in these matters, and proceeds to offer Pan-
urge the benefit of biblical precept. His wife will
be virtuous if she is, among other things, a God-
fearing woman who will not readily infringe
God’s commandment against adultery. Similarly,
Hippothadée tells Panurge that he must encour-
age her by living as chastely himself as he ex-
pects her to do. These are obviously general pre-
cepts, and whether or not they work in the
particular case of Panurge and his hypothetical
spouse remains subject to the proviso, “God will-
ing.” Panurge rejects this advice, ostensibly on
the grounds that female virtue, as envisaged by
Hippothadée, no longer exists. The reader may
suspect also that Panurge is not attracted by the
emphasis on his own responsibility to behave vir-
tuously and set a good example.
Panurge’s rejection of his advice presumably
counts as a failure for Hippothadée. The failure
Homenaz 117
is not, of course, very remarkable in that Panurge
rejects almost all advice in the Third Book. More
importantly, Hippothadée’s failure and his gra-
cious acceptance of it may also be taken to reflect
his own guiding principle, “God willing.”
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997);
Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (Lon-
don: Arnold, 1958).
Ian R. Morrison
HOMENAZ (4BK 49–54) When Pantagruel
and his friends stop off at the Island of the Pap-
imaniacs (L’Isle des Papimanes), they are met
first by the Papimaniacs themselves, whose def-
inition of the Pope, “He who is” (“Celluy qui
est”), parallels the traditional definition of God.
Homenaz, their bishop, encourages the idolatry
of the Pope, “God on Earth” (“Dieu en Terre”),
whom Pantagruel asserts is not visible to human
beings: “We certainly never saw him, and he is
not visible to corporal eyes” (“Oncques, certes
ne le veismes, et n’est visible à oilz corporelz”
[4BK 49]). The bishop of Papimania represents
all that is criticized by the evangelical reform of
the early sixteenth century. Astride his mule,
decked out in green, Homenaz comes equipped
with all the material trappings of the Church:
“croix, banieres, confalons, baldachins, torches,
benoistiers” (49).
Rabelais satirizes the Church’s overemphasis
on objects of ritual through the debasement of
ritual brought about by sexual or scatological
wordplay. In response to Homenaz’s suggestion
that they confess and fast for three days before
contemplating the real, authentic copy of the De-
cretals, Panurge responds with an obscene pun:
“De cons fesser, respondit Panurge, très bien,
nous consentons” (“To cuntfess, replied Panurge,
very well, we agree” [4BK 49]).
Having attended mass, Homenaz unveils the
portrait of the Pope and asks Pantagruel to iden-
tify him. Pantagruel does so by calling attention
to the rich exterior symbols of the Pope, not to
the serenity of his gaze and the humility of his
posture: “I recognize him by his tiara, his robe,
the ratchet, and his slippers” (50). According to
Christian evangelism as set forth by Erasmus,
Rome adorns its cardinals and pope at the ex-
pense of the faithful flock. Homenaz and the Pap-
118 Homer
imaniacs await the Pope, as Christians await the
second coming of Christ: “This is the image of
that God of goodness on earth, whose coming
we devoutly await and whom we hope one day
to see in this country” (50). Homenaz’s reverence
for even the painted image of the Pope, and his
marvel that members of Pantagruel’s group have
actually seen the Pope, lead to a discussion of
the Church’s bellicose actions against all who
rebel against the papal abuse of power, “against
them alone making cruel and treacherous war”
(“eulx seulz guerre faire felonne et tres cruelle”).
By his respect for the Pope’s abuse of power
in fighting heretics, rebels, and Protestants, as
well as princes who support them, Homenaz and
the Church represent the spirit of anticaritas—
those forces that try to bend the spirit of Chris-
tians through fear and force, symbolized in the
articles of canon law detailed in the Decretals
rather than through acts of faith, hope, and char-
ity (Duval 73–74) (see Decretals; Eulogy, Sa-
tirical).
Reading: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva: Droz,
1998).
Deborah Nichols Losse
HOMER Simply as a linguistic entity, the
Rabelaisian chronicles are, of course, epic, and
in more ways than one. They are epic in terms
of their sheer size, semantic richness, and nar-
rative scope: Rabelais’s prolixity, the triumph, in
his work, rhetorically speaking, of amplificatio,
digressio, and copia, make him a truly epic au-
thor in the Homeric sense. The tendency toward
verbal superabundance in the Chroniques, and
the importance above all of the list (for example,
the catalog of Saint-Victor, the fatras des plai-
doyers, or nonsensical arguments of Baisecul
and Humevesne, the Iliadic catalogue of ships,
etc.) as the distinctive feature of Rabelaisian
prose, arguably make this work the most Ho-
meric of early modern artifacts in France—com-
pared to, say, Pierre de Ronsard’s ill-conceived
and ill-fated Françiade. (The Bible, it goes
without saying, has a more immediate bearing on
Rabelaisian style, but in this sense the Bible can
be considered an epic work.)
To the extent that Rabelais’s Chroniques rep-
resent an attack on the Faculty of Arts and me-
dieval scholasticism and seek to promote the
new humanism, we are authorized to investigate
Rabelais’s debt, more specifically, to the Greco-
Roman epic: above all to Homer and Virgil. It
should be stated at the outset that other classical
authors are more influential: Plato, Cicero, Plu-
tarch, Lucian, and Horace first and foremost
come to mind. Rabelais knew these authors (or,
more precisely, knew what others knew about
them) better than he knew Homer. What role,
then, do Homer and Homeric epic play in the
Chroniques?
Consider, first, Gargantua’s oft-cited letter to
Pantagruel (P 8), the topos par excellence of
Rabelais’s humanistic message. The first tenet of
this new studia humanitatis is the learning of
Greek and Latin. The primacy of classical liter-
ature advocated in this letter represents, in itself,
a significant departure, it has been pointed out,
from the medieval orbis doctrinarum that Rabe-
lais is contesting. But note that Homer himself is
nowhere explicitly referred to in this document.
The omission is significant. There are countless
references to Homer in the Chroniques, but these
references may be as much signs of what Rabe-
lais knows as what he does not know; indices of
cultural distance as of proximity. Are these ref-
erences allusions, echoes, arguments? The ques-
tion is one that Rabelais himself anticipates, and
it goes to the very question of Rabelais’s seman-
tic and semiotic instability—the difficulty read-
ers have had, over the centuries, in pinning him
down.
Thus, the most significant reference to Homer
in the Chroniques is precisely the one that ex-
plicitly alerts us to the dangers of ascribing to
that reference any particular significance. The
Homeric allusion occurs in the preface to Gar-
gantua, the “Prologe de l’Auteur,” where Rabe-
lais promises his readers, in the narrative upon
which they are about to embark, a miraculous
and therapeutic truth—a kind of truth precisely
parallel to that offered by Homer in his epic
proemia, a truth in Homer guaranteed by the con-
nection between the poet and the Muse (and thus,
by extension, Zeus himself, author of all plots).
But a moment later Rabelais warns us against
squeezing too much message out of this text’s
“substantificque moelle” or marrow, comparing
us to Homer’s overzealous allegorizers, those

critics who read outlandish and extraneous mes-
sages in the work of the epic poet. In other
words, to read Rabelais as a Homericist has its
dangers. There is no question that Rabelais com-
pares himself to Homer here—but how seriously
and how far should we take that comparison?
Rabelais does not tell us.
What Rabelais does point to in this passage,
however, is his identity as a pasticheur. Static
reverence (or reference) to any one particular au-
thor is precisely the kind of scholastic learning
Rabelais is attempting to combat. Where, we
might ask, is Rabelais getting his Homer from?
Mostly from second- and third-hand sources,
such as Plutarch and Erasmus’s Adages. Anyone
insisting on the link between Homer and Rabe-
lais must take into account cautionary passages
such as the one found in chapter 24 of the Third
Book. Epistémon has lost patience with Pan-
urge who, we know, has vowed not to marry
until his doubts regarding fidelity are resolved.
Epistémon compares Panurge’s vow to one made
by a Spanish knight and recorded in a fifteenth-
century chronicle on the Hundred Years’ War by
one Enguerrard de Monstrelet. The reference al-
lows Rabelais, in one of his typical digressions,
to compare his work implicitly to Monstrelet’s,
a work that thereby becomes a kind of image of
the very work we are reading, the Third Book.
Rabelais’s reading of Enguerrard (and by exten-
sion Epistémon’s reading of Panurge’s vow) re-
lies on a line from Horace, taken from Erasmus,
parturiunt montes (“mountains giving birth” . . .
ultimately to mere mice), on epic ambitions giv-
ing rise to less than epic results. The scene is
significant for our purposes here because the Ho-
ratian passage to which Rabelais alludes here ex-
plicitly refers to Homer as the ultimate epic
model, in which ambition is matched by creation.
Two important and contradictory messages
seem to be delivered in this scene. First, Rabelais
is once again comparing himself to Homer. But
it is just as clear that Rabelais, by way of Horace,
Erasmus, and Enguerrard, is mocking that very
comparison. Rabelais appears to be announcing
that he is writing precisely the kind of epic Hor-
ace tells us not to write—and that he knows this.
One must remember then that what might be im-
portant in a discussion of Rabelais as Homericist
Homer 119
is as much his departure from Homeric motifs
and techniques as his adherence to them.
Far too many Homeric commonplaces occur
for us to address them in even a cursory fashion.
Let us skip over Rabelais’s manipulation of Il-
iadic war scenes, Paris as Homeric polis, the fo-
cus on the role of the journey as perhaps the most
significant Homeric topos in the Chroniques.
This is obvious in the last three of the Chro-
niques, which constitute a maritime epic, like
Homer’s Odyssey. Elsewhere, of course, Rabe-
lais’s narrative is everywhere crisscrossed by
journeys—such as the journey, in Pantagruel,
into Pantagruel’s mouth. But it is just as obvious
that these are also anti-Homeric journeys. Con-
sider the fact, for example, that the Third Book
ends—rather than begins—with Panurge’s mar-
itime quest: a most un-Homeric poetic structure.
Consider, too, that Panurge’s journey is
prompted by a skeptical inquiry into the nature
of marriage and the possibility of fidelity, while
Odysseus’s journey is, in simple terms, a journey
back to the arms of a faithful wife! The Third
Book, along with the Fourth Book and the Fifth
Book, is therefore more precisely an anti-
Odyssey than an Odyssey.
Panurge, it should be clear by now, is in many
ways the most Odyssean of Rabelaisian figures.
Panurge, like Odysseus, is a trickster and a trav-
eler, a pragmatist and a polyglot. This is shown
in our very first encounter with him in Panta-
gruel 9, where Panurge’s linguistic tour de force,
his request for food in several different lan-
guages, in fact defers the completion of that re-
quest. As this last scene suggests, Panurge, like
Odysseus, is a very human proponent of the pri-
macy of hunger, of the appetitive force.
Note that in chapter 13 of the Third Book, Pan-
urge’s dreams as a potential guide for his journey
are compared to Homer’s gates of ivory and horn
through which true and false dreams pass (Od-
yssey 19.563; see also Aeneid 6.893, although
Rabelais’s reference, we are not surprised, is
taken from Macrobius). The passage, like its Ho-
meric and Virgilian precedents, is one that leaves
us—and Panurge—more, not less, uncertain
about how to go about seeking truth and how to
go about guaranteeing that truth. Panurge’s jour-
ney, we know, is motivated by a desire to find
that truth, to arrive at a stable and fixed propo-
120 Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon
sition. But surely it is the ultimate aim of Ra-
belais’s entire epic project to undermine the pos-
sibility of such a journey and such a destination.
The Dive Bouteille, with which Panurge’s quest
ends in the Fifth Book, does not give us an an-
swer; rather, it tells us to keep searching for one
and to delight in that very process. And thus we
conclude with that most enigmatic and seductive
of seascapes in the Rabelaisian odyssey, the ep-
isode of the Frozen Words in the Fourth Book
55–56. The scene points simultaneously to the
possibility of language as something stable,
while reminding us that, ultimately the semiotic
world must remain, as fluid and as treacherous
as the ocean. In the Fourth Book 55, Panurge
remembers that Aristotle “claims that Homer’s
words flutter and fly, alive and moving” (“main-
tient les parolles de Homere estre voligeantes,
volantes, moventes, et par consequent animées”).
Perhaps that is precisely how we should regard
Rabelais’s words.
Readings: Terence Cave, “Panurge and Odysseus,”
Myth and Legend in French Literature, ed. Keith As-
pley, David Bellos, Peter Sharratt (London: Modern
Humanities Research Association, 1982) 47–50; Gér-
ard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du
monde dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle,”
French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexington, KY:
French Forum, 1982); Gérard Defaux, “Une recontre
homérique: Panurge noble, pérégrin et curieux,” FF
6.2 (1981): 109–122.
Matthew Gumpert
HÔTEL-DIEU DE LYON Public hospital
known formally as the “grand hostel Dieu de No-
tre Dame de Pitié du Pont-du-Rhône” where Ra-
belais served as main physician from 1532 to
1534. Evolving from its status as a hospice
whose primary function was to provide suste-
nance and lodging for the sick and destitute, the
Hôtel-Dieu had in years prior to Rabelais’s arri-
val obtained municipal funds, thus expanding its
services to include medical treatment, pharma-
ceutical services, and resources for cases of fam-
ine. The main hospital operated under conditions
hardly imaginable today: one vast room was di-
vided in two parts by pillars and contained six
rows of beds, each bed providing space for two
to three patients at a time. A maternity ward was
located in another building, and one other room
was reserved for those suffering from contagious
diseases. For his extremely modest salary of 40
livres per year, Rabelais accepted heavy respon-
sibilities that carried serious risks to his own
health. Among his duties, the most rigorous in-
cluded daily visits to each of the hospital’s 150
to 220 patients, accompanied by a barber-
surgeon to whom he prescribed procedures to be
performed under his supervision. A meager sal-
ary combined with the serious limitations of the
therapeutic and psychological resources available
to cure patients undoubtedly led Rabelais to seek
other means of income as well as other means of
expressing his healing art. Both environment and
patients at the Hôtel-Dieu provided ample fodder
for the development of the allegories, not to men-
tion an audience; here was the population of
gouty syphilitics the dear Alcofrybas wished to
heal.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles
Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin,
1988).
Lesa Randall
HUMANISM The new learning that began to
emerge in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century
and grew to shape the culture of the Renaissance
for the next 250 years. It was called humanism
because it was based on the studia humanitatis,
or “humanities”—classical languages, rhetoric,
literature, and history, as opposed to the medie-
val disciplines of logic and theology. Whereas
medieval learning tended to focus on abstract and
atemporal truths in a divinely ordered world, hu-
manism was more concerned with the cultural
context, literary form, and historical meaning of
individual texts and works.
The most characteristic aspect of humanism
was its deep-rooted conviction that classical an-
tiquity marked the high point of Western civili-
zation, that this golden age of arts and letters
came to a tragic end with the barbaric invasions
and the fall of Rome, and that the centuries fol-
lowing this calamity were no more than a long
night of barbarism and ignorance—or at best a
continuous process of degeneration during which
the splendors of Greece and Rome were gradu-
ally corrupted beyond recognition. The “gothic”
culture of the “Middle Ages” was thus to be re-

jected, to make way for a new golden age of arts
and letters modeled on antiquity. The impulse to
return to the pure sources of Western culture (ad
fontes) gave rise to many new disciplines (pale-
ography, textual criticism, archaeology, numis-
matics, historical linguistics), to the rediscovery
of many lost authors and works (e.g., Lucretius
and Cicero’s familiar letters), to the recovery of
the Greek language and the entire extant corpus
of Greek literature which had been utterly lost to
the West since the time of Constantine, and ul-
timately to a new intellectual, artistic, and civic
culture in Europe.
As humanism moved northward, its methods
came to be applied to Judeo-Christian as well as
Greco-Roman antiquity. Christian humanists like
Erasmus turned their attention to the original
Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, as well as
to the Christian religion as it was originally prac-
ticed by the first Christians of the “Primitive
Church.” This literary, historicizing approach to
Christianity led to the view that the Bible is the
only legitimate authority in matters of religion
and that the “Middle Ages” had brought about
the same corruption in theology and ecclesiology
that it had in arts and letters—views that in turn
gave rise to the Protestant Reformation.
Both forms of humanism found fertile ground
in sixteenth-century France, despite strenuous
opposition from the University of Paris and its
reactionary Faculty of Theology. King Francis I
encouraged the spread of humanism in France by
naming “lecteurs du Roi” to teach the new dis-
ciplines—most notably the “three languages”:
classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—without in-
terference from a hostile Sorbonne. Rabelais in
particular was profoundly influenced by this new
learning and was a respectable humanist in his
own right, as is evident from his letters written
in elegant Latin and Greek to figures like Eras-
mus and the great French Hellenist and legal
scholar Guillaume Budé, and from his earliest
publications: editions of Hippocrates and Galen,
of Marliani’s topography of ancient Rome, of a
legal document that Rabelais took to be an an-
cient Roman will. Rabelais’s fictional works in
the vernacular are no less informed by the ide-
ology of humanism, despite their obvious popu-
lar aspects. Gargantua’s famous letter to Pan-
tagruel (P 8) expresses the typical humanist
Humanism 121
view of the Middle Ages as a thousand-year pe-
riod of gothic darkness and the Renaissance as a
luminous moment in which ancient disciplines,
languages, and texts have been restored, and the
traditional professional disciplines (law, medi-
cine, and theology) completely reformed. More
revealing is the fact that the humanist education
spelled out in this letter allows Pantagruel to per-
form miracles of justice, to restore the Church to
its original evangelical purity, and to establish a
new Golden Age of peace and harmony in Uto-
pia.
The sequels to Pantagruel are increasingly hu-
manistic in their allusions to history, literature,
and legal, medical, and biblical scholarship, but
at the same time they express a growing skepti-
cism about the regenerative value of pure learn-
ing. In Gargantua, the hero’s education is essen-
tially irrelevant to his later exploits and plays no
role in the defeat of Picrochole or in the aboli-
tion of monasticism in the utopian Abbey of
Thélème. Moreover, the comical narrator of
Gargantua frequently appears to be a learned
fool, as when he argues for the legitimacy of
children of doubtful paternity on the basis of os-
tentatious humanistic medical and legal learning.
The Third Book, by far the most densely erudite
of all Rabelais’s books, goes even further to sug-
gest that no necessary connection exists between
learning and understanding, between knowledge
and wisdom. The examples of Panurge, Epis-
témon, and Bridoye would in fact suggest that
knowledge and wisdom are mutually exclusive,
if the counterexample of Pantagruel did not show
that true wisdom can result only when learning
is tempered by skepticism, irony, and love. This
idea, already expressed in a well-known phrase
in Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (“knowledge
without conscience is ruinous to the soul” [“sci-
ence sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”]
P 8), leads ultimately to the conclusion that Ra-
belais, like so many of his contemporaries, came
to view humanism as an effective arm against
ignorance but powerless to cure stupidity or vice.
Readings: Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie, ER
24, THR, 245 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Gilbert Gadoffre,
La révolution culturelle dans la France des human-
istes: Guillaume Budé et François Ier, Titre courant 8
(Geneva: Droz, 1997); Margaret Mann Phillips, Eras-
mus and the Northern Renaissance, rev. ed. (Wood-
122 Humor
bridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, and Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); Roberto Weiss, The
Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed.
(Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988).
Edwin M. Duval
HUMOR Rabelais has frequently been named
as the world’s greatest comic genius. At the very
least he provides abundant fieldwork for the anal-
ysis of humor. His erudite satire, often prose-
cuted under Erasmus’s aegis, promotes the ad-
vancement of humanist learning, the evangelical
reform of the Church, the need for humanity and
brotherhood in politics, and so on, and appeals
most to those privileging the modern and critical
ideas we are encouraged to appreciate, ahead of
the grotesque and vulgar comic sequences we are
invited to enjoy. Those, like Mikhail Bakhtin,
who respond more to the comic episodes, require
a different apparatus. Accordingly, they stress
Rabelais’s identification with the people in terms
of folk rituals whereby the giant-heroes embody
solar or chthonian qualities rather than Christian
ones, connecting less with spiritual and intellec-
tual improvement than with the turning of the
seasons, the defeat of oldtime, and the enjoyment
of material abundance. Both strategies are pos-
sible, nor are they mutually opposed, and behind
the one narratee who delights in the learned fes-
tivitas and the other responding to the bawdy
jokes, there stands a reader who discerns how,
why, and in what measure Rabelais produces his
different comic stimuli. For even the world’s
greatest comic genius can do no more than this.
Humor is not humor until it has generated a re-
sponse, and given the central importance Rabe-
lais accords to freedom, he less than most will
demand to be read in one way only and enjoyed
on but one specific agenda.
The humorous agendas are basically four,
which again may simplify the subject, although
hopefully without coercing a response. The first
agenda concerns the said campaigns in which
Rabelais engaged, using laughter to enhance his
principles in the spirit of Guillaume Budé and
other Renaissance mentors. He derides medieval
scholarship both in its methods and its represen-
tatives, the Sorbonne, for instance. He mocks
ritual prayer, the traffic in indulgences, monas-
ticism, pilgrimage, Roman rather than universal
Catholicism, and its converse, dogmatic Protes-
tantism. He lampoons the emperor Charles V,
implying that his policies are tyrannical, and si-
multaneously he warns his own monarchs against
the crimes that often accompany territorial ex-
pansion.
These satires depend on a set of value systems
that the reader must appreciate and the narratee
must share. For example, unless one knows the
rudiments of the Tridentine controversy, then
many passages of the Fourth Book will be im-
penetrable and their humor dormant. The incon-
gruity fundamental to this value-based satire in-
volves a failure on the part of the target figure,
always to some degree a fool, to satisfy a norm
inherent in the particular system: Homenaz is a
case in point. Such norms might be constructive
learning, responsible government, or the lessons
of the Sermon on the Mount. The effect of the
humor is either to reinforce the value system
within those already accepting it (much of Rab-
elaisian satire is too radical to be seriously in-
tended to convert opponents), or to stress its im-
portance to those initially indifferent to his
campaigns but attracted by the comical way in
which they are prosecuted.
Were Rabelaisian humor reducible to this sin-
gle mechanism, then it would be very staid and
predictable, certainly an unfair criticism even of
his satire. That value-based satire is in fact dou-
bled by a second, equally aggressive pattern, but
it depends on shared loyalties rather than on
shared standards. This mode may be termed clan-
based satire, and it operates first in simple op-
positions like the rivalry between villagers (as at
the start of the Picrocholine War), Rabelais’s nar-
ratorial hostility to the Parisians (as they are
scorned on the arrival of both giants at the city),
or the very battle of the sexes where the same
narrator is unrestrainedly, even depressingly,
prejudiced. Witness the death of Gargamelle to
which he expresses total indifference. Second, it
can ape value-based satire in using for stimulus
the same basic incongruities (for instance, the
stupidity of Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bridé),
but the emotional charge securing its response is
different. The clan-based satirist is not essentially
a campaigner; hence Rabelais can get away with
attacking those scholastics for a program that
was in fact no longer in use by his time of writ-

ing. Instead he seeks to reinforce a clan-identity,
however trivially determined. Many comic
means can be exercised in this regard, ranging
from such blatant yah-booing as the Parisians’
insulting of Gargantua after Notre Dame to the
fertile and perplexing exchanges at that scholarly
symposium focal within the Third Book.
To counter this approach, as some have, by
saying that Rabelais’s clans are determined by
values is to beg the question of Panurge, a per-
manent clan member of the Pantagruelistes but
one far from embodying their ethics. Moreover,
those who read Rabelais’s latter books as a
chronicle of Panurge’s degeneration are missing
a great opportunity—namely, his lionization as
comic hero, notable in the sheep-trader sequence
of the Fourth Book (see Dindenault). Were it not
possible to convert Panurge into a triumphant
clown, then again Rabelais would be at best a
first-rate moralist but not a comic genius. Of
course, one may target Panurge for his abysmal
failures and join in the self-congratulating com-
pany that scapegoats him, say, at the closing of
the Fourth Book with its practical joke of the
cannonade plus unfortunate aftermath. Con-
versely, one may admire him for deliberately
flouting the values of normal living, be it in his
criminality (robbing the Church), his sexuality
(deflowering the Parisian maidens), his self-
obsession (worrying endlessly over a marriage
surely destined for catastrophe were it ever to
happen), nay his very self-respect (rolling in his
own filth during the storm but never ashamed
for having done so).
Comic antiheroes of this type, Reynard to name
but one, have a deep, even cultic significance that
survives in the court jesters of the Renaissance but
is more striking in the trickster gods of antiquity
and folklore. For want of a better term we may
call their mode knavish parody, and its appeal is
based on the release which their humor grants
from the demands of propriety and responsible
living. We exploit them in a vicarious rebellion
against codes to which we consciously adhere;
meanwhile what takes place in our subconscious
is another matter. Set against them, moreover, is a
second type of parodic figure, also apparent in Ra-
belais, nay even Panurge as his most significant
character, and that is the naı̈f.
Rather than defying the value systems of
Humor 123
honor, respectability, and so on, the naı̈ve figure
is simply unaware of them, as Gargantua in his
infancy ignores grown-up propriety in eating
from the same bowl as his dogs, and investigat-
ing, with puerile ingenuity, the ideal arse-wipe.
The humor thus created is like that attendant on
a child’s stumbling over a chair or indeed over
a sentence, its appeal being based not on effront-
ery but on simplicity. Our response, say, to
scenes of peasants’ festivals (e.g., G 5) or of chil-
dren’s playtime (e.g., G 11) combines nostalgia
for our own lost innocence with wistfulness at
the inevitable loss of theirs. However, in fiction,
especially Rabelais’s, inevitability is not so de-
termined—hence the success of a simple peasant
against the devil, the incongruous charm of the
ugly Ennasins or the bumbling Andouilles, and
the triumph of the youthful Frère Jean which
eclipses his lack of scholarship or vocational
awareness.
Intellectual approaches can again do little to
vindicate these figures. The reaction they generate
against civilized standards is primarily emotional,
being totemized in the wild man or the noble sav-
age, and perceptible in the clown, the drunk, the
idiot, or the ingénu. In terms of this mode, the
narrator himself may be seen as harmlessly and
endearingly delighted with the preposterous word
lists and other lexical nonsense his author has so
carefully assembled for him.
In Rabelais as in all sophisticated humorists,
these comic modes, along with others detectable
within other approaches (for instance, the mad-
man’s pathological laughter or the ecstatic’s rap-
turous joy), combine and interpenetrate to a de-
gree of complexity, defying reliable predictions
and conclusions. Not to mention their later ad-
ventures, who can insist on the precise modal
balance operating in the very first meeting of
Pantagruel with Panurge? Thus far, the giant
himself has embodied more than one humorous
style: he is still not fully initiated into adult living
(naı̈ve parody once more), yet he is well capable
of enforcing a value-based satire such as that vis-
ited on the Ecolier Limousin. Meanwhile, Pan-
urge combines the comic allure of the naı̈ve out-
sider with the deliberate craziness of the knave
and is arguably scapegoated by the clan he is on
the very point of joining. Surely it is more than
obvious what his needs are, yet they refuse (in
124 Humor
sly mockery of his appearance and manner?) to
look beyond his weird and eccentric words.
Here, as ever in the best comic scenes and sce-
narios, considerable initiative is handed over to
the reader, who will choose which pattern to em-
phasize at a particular juncture and how to en-
hance it: “le rire est le propre de l’homme” in
this sense also. The huge disagreements that Ra-
belais scholarship has endured merely bear tes-
tament to the comic resourcefulness he enjoyed.
Meanwhile, the reader’s joy in exploiting those
resources springs from the execution of a prerog-
ative the author respects in full degree.
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais
Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,
1998); Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discon-
tinu (Paris: Champion, 1994); Daniel Ménager, La
Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1995); Colette Quesnel, Mourir de rire
d’après et avec Rabelais (Paris: Vrin, 1991); Michael
A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Lon-
don: Allen Lane, 1997); Marcel Tetel, Etude sur le
comique de Rabelais (Florence: Olschki, 1964); Flor-
ence M. Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire (Or-
léans: Paradigme, 2000).
John Parkin
 I
IDLENESS Rabelais’s works encompass with
an almost encyclopedic breadth the diverse forms
of idleness ranging from contemplation to tennis.
It first emerges in the form of recreation in the
prologue to Pantagruel where Alcofrybas prom-
ises to increase the reader’s “pastimes” by pro-
viding a delightfully entertaining and very useful
sequel to the popular Gargantuan Chronicles (P
prol.). Reading is figured here as a “hobby”—a
conception quickly gaining ground during the
Renaissance, even though the word “loisirs”
would not assume the precise meaning of
“hobby” until the eighteenth century.
When idleness resurfaces in Gargantua, it is
with a clearly humanist meaning. The prologue
recalls Plato’s Symposium while establishing a
context of feasting and conversation that consti-
tute a common backdrop in Gargantua. The pro-
logue and other scenes of conversation around a
table with friends (G 4, 37–39) represent scenes
of leisure in the tradition of sermo convivialis.
At the same time, Rabelaisian banquets often
correspond to religious holidays such as Mardi
Gras (G 4) or may recall the Eucharistic sacrifice
(4BK 1). These scenes point to the close prox-
imity of leisure to the sacred insofar as the Sab-
bath, feasts, and holidays all offer a means for
humanity to participate in the sacred through lei-
sure.
In contrast, if Frère Jean’s contempt for otia
monastica (otia-idleness) is any indication, Ra-
belais seems to put little stock in monastic con-
templation—the highest order of leisure through-
out the Middle Ages but in clear decline during
the Renaissance. Idle monks (“ces ocieux moy-
nes”) suffer in comparison to hard-working peas-
ants, warriors, evangelical preachers, doctors,
and even merchants (G 38). A perpetually busy,
hard-working Benedictine who is also a “bon
compagnon,” Frère Jean is presented as a bur-
lesque alternative to the cloistered contemplative.
“I am never idle” (G 38) serves as the motto of
this proudly anticontemplative monk. Finally,
leisured aristocrats replace cloistered monks as
the privileged inhabitants of the utopian Abbey
of Thélème with which Gargantua concludes.
Rabelais has provided for every aristocratic pas-
time imaginable from the jardin de plaisance and
tennis courts to three-level baths. Most of all,
however, the Thélèmites appear to be devoted to
the hunt, long the quintessential aristocratic pas-
time (G 53).
At the heart of the prologue to the Third Book
is the age-old debate pitting the vita activa
against the vita contemplativa. Rabelais bor-
rowed the Diogenes anecdote from Guillaume
Budé and Lucian, but the problem is indeed a
familiar one commonly included in Renaissance
books of sententiae, which consisted of maxims,
aphorisms, and commentaries on life and daily
living. As his compatriots engage in fervent prep-
arations for an impending attack, Diogenes—a
figure for the author but also for the intellectual
in general—first contemplates their actions and
then decides to take part. For he did not wish to
be the only one to appear idle: “pour . . . n’estre
veu seul cessateur et ocieux” (3BK pro.). Some
scholars see in this anecdote a defense of the in-
tellectual’s commitment to the res publica in
keeping with Rabelaisian praise of active virtue.
Other critics instead emphasize a latent irony: the
cynic’s overstated willingness to participate is
belied by the actual merit of his contribution
(his famous tub-rolling does not advance the
Corinthians’ cause in any manifest way), just as
his compatriots’ actions possess an element of
absurdity. (The war they are preparing for is de-
scribed as “ceste insigne fable et tragicque co-
medie.”) In either case, the choice between the
active life and the speculative life is recast as
126 Illustrations
the choice between being an actor in a tragic
farce rather than a spectator—a properly Di-
ogenic decentering of a familiar debate in keep-
ing with the ethos of the Greek cynic.
Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et
l’humanisme civil (Geneva: Droz, 1992); Marc Fu-
maroli, “Otium, convivium, sermo: La Conversation
comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettrés,” Le loisir lettré à
l’âge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-Joseph
Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996);
Virginia Krause, Idle Pursuits: Literature and ‘Oisiv-
eté’ in the French Renaissance (Newark: Delaware
University Press, 2003); Les loisirs et l’héritage de la
culture classique, ed. J.-M. André, J. Dangel, and P.
Demont (Brussels: Latomus, 1996).
Virginia Krause
ILLUSTRATIONS Rabelais’s Pantagrueline
oeuvre has been associated with illustrations
since its initial sixteenth-century publication. Ge-
neric as well as custom woodcuts appear in the
frontispieces of original editions of Rabelais’s
four narratives. It is widely believed that the
famed French Renaissance architect of châteaux,
Philibert de Lorme, sketched the famous Abbey
of Thélème described by Rabelais at the end of
Gargantua. The 1565 Songes drolatiques de
Pantagruel, a collection of 120 engravings de-
picting monstrous, yet whimsical, figures, is at-
tributed to Rabelais himself. Although Rabelais
almost certainly knew nothing of this work pub-
lished thirteen years after his death, its appear-
ance reveals his readers’ interest and indeed
yearning to see depictions of his fanciful stories.
All of Rabelais’s mock epics offer convoluted
narratives, improbable characters, and colorful
vocabulary. As such, they lend themselves to il-
lustration. Illustrators of Rabelais have by and
large relied on the same episodes for their illus-
trations, even though their interpretations may
vary markedly. The eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century illustrators appear to have
been less concerned, or perhaps simply less
taken, with the massive stature of the giants
Gargantua and Pantagruel than they were with
attempting to represent their actions. In a 1741
edition illustrated by Picart, Pantagruel appears
oversized rather than gigantic. Picart is seem-
ingly inconsistent: in the same edition he has cre-
ated a Gargantua twice as tall as in a previous
illustration. Curiously, this inconsistency reflects
Rabelais’s own narrative discrepancies. At times
his episodes emphasize the gigantic, and at others
they downplay it.
The nineteenth century not only repopularized
Rabelais’s work in general but also took interest
in depictions of the giants, their cohorts, and their
environs. Widespread attention among readers
began with the 1854 Bry edition of Rabelais’s
complete works. An edition of fairly low qual-
ity—cheap paper and small type—it was none-
theless very popular due to its illustrations by
Gustave Doré. Doré went on to illustrate the
1873 Garnier edition of Rabelais, expanding the
number of illustrations and, most significantly,
providing a more detailed and reflective style that
both ennobled the giants and made memorable
key episodes. The Doré illustrations now typify
Rabelais’s characters, and it is these which are
most often found in modern-day editions.
Early twentieth-century illustrations vary
greatly. The pen and ink drawings of the 1922
Clouzot edition are in some ways the most ef-
fective in presenting the giants’ presence: by
showing only parts of the giant, the viewer is left
to develop the scale. Hueuenin’s 1937 edition of
Gargantua offers bold expressionist lithographs
of episodes previously neglected by illustrators.
Rabelais’s oeuvre has been a popular choice for
livres-d’artiste editions. Artists such as Clavé
and Dérain have produced lithographs and wood
engravings for limited editions of Pantagruel
and Gargantua.
Readings: Gustave Doré, illus., Les oeuvres de
François Rabelais (Paris: J. Bry aı̂né, 1854); Gustave
Doré, illus., Les oeuvres de François Rabelais, 2 vols.
(Paris: Frères Garnier, 1873); W. J. Strachan, The Art-
ist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre
d’artiste (New York: George Wittenborn, 1969).
Margaret Harp
IMITATION AND PARODY The deliberate
recollection of features from ancient or contem-
porary textual models. When attempted for
comic purposes, the imitation is known as “par-
ody.” Imitation was an essential process in all
writings of the Renaissance, itself an imitative
phenomenon as it attempted to reproduce the aes-
thetic and ethical values of antiquity. It was
thought to be the chief means through which as-

piring writers could achieve the greatness at-
tained by the classics, such as the epics of Virgil
or Homer, the letters of Cicero, or even more
modern works such as the lyric poetry of Pe-
trarch. Several Renaissance scholars (including
Erasmus, Bembo, and Joachim du Bellay) de-
bated the preferred methods of imitation, and in
so doing they imitated classical theorists such as
Cicero and Quintilian. Whereas some Renais-
sance scholars focused on the imitation of partic-
ular stylistic features, others urged the cultivation
of classical genres as a whole. The most perva-
sive debate on imitation in the Renaissance was
the “Ciceronian quarrel,” which questioned
whether new writers should base their style only
on the single perfect model of Cicero or on a
wider variety of good models. While imitators
hoped to gain glory by echoing the manner of
great writers, those who engaged in parody often
exaggerated the style or otherwise caricatured
their sources in the hopes of generating laughter
among readers who recognized the disparity be-
tween the sublimity of the model and the base-
ness of the imitation. Imitation abounds in the
works of Rabelais. Indeed, Rabelais presents his
first book, Pantagruel, as an explicit imitation or
continuation of a popular contemporary text, the
Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua. Rabelais’s
imitations most often take the form of parodies.
The Pantagruel, Gargantua, and Fourth Book
have been seen as mock epics because their
structure, characters, and events recall the works
of Homer and Virgil.
Other models for Rabelais include medieval
chivalric romances and their Renaissance Italian
continuations. Imitation and parody, particularly
of a stylistic nature, also figure into several in-
dividual episodes. These include P 7 (where the
titles of books found in the Library of Saint-
Victor lampoon those of genuine scholarship on
law, medicine, and religion); P 10–13, P 18, and
G 19 (where the language of scholastic disputa-
tion is spoofed); P 3 (which caricatures the genre
of the déploration funèbre); P 8, G 29 and 31,
3BK 48, and 4BK 4 (which mimic the lofty style
of Cicero); P 21–22 (which mock the language
of courtly love and Petrarchism); and 3BK 3–4,
which parody the classical encomium by praising
debt). In addition, several incidents appear to
constitute biblical parodies, including P 2 (on the
Interpretations 127
“nativity” of Pantagruel), P 30 (on the “resur-
rection” of Epistémon), and P 21–24 (which
may include several parodic references to
Christ’s passion). Finally, even contemporary art
may have provided Rabelais with fodder for im-
itation and parody, as the “torchecul” or arsewipe
episode (G 12) has been seen as a parody of Mi-
chelangelo’s Leda and the Swan.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Raymond Lebègue, “Ra-
belais et la parodie,” BHR 14 (1952): 193–204; Fran-
çois Rigolot, “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais’s Parody
of Michelangelo,” RQ 38 (1985): 688–700; François
Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity:
Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of
Exemplarity,” PMLA 109 (1994): 225–37; Marcel Te-
tel, Etude sur le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Ol-
schki, 1964).
JoAnn DellaNeva
INTERPRETATIONS The problematics of
interpretation lie at the very heart of Rabelais’s
narrative fiction. From the outset, the reader is
struck by the number of episodes devoted to an
assortment of enigmatic signs leading to spirited
discussions of their possible meanings. The
whole of Book 3 can be viewed as a set of var-
iations on this same thematic pattern. But it is of
course the celebrated prologue to Gargantua that
raises the issue of interpretation as it applies spe-
cifically to the ensuing narrative, and by exten-
sion to the entire series of Rabelais’s novels. The
fictional narrator of the preceding Pantagruel
had introduced his story as nothing more than an
escapist entertainment whose sole objective was
to provoke laughter. Gargantua, on the other
hand, lays claim (though not without ambiguity)
to an altogether higher purpose. Through a series
of analogies culminating with the memorably ir-
reverent assimilation of the reader with a dog
gnawing on a bone in frenzied search of its sus-
tantificque mouelle or marrow, we are invited to
seek, beyond the work’s frivolous exterior, a
higher, hidden meaning that only a symbolic
reading can hope to uncover. The invitation to
interpret the book à plus hault sens is withdrawn
almost as soon as it is offered, and the prefatory
pages of Gargantua turn out to be as mystifying
as the ensuing pages they are meant to explain.
128 Interpretations
But the seed has been planted, and for the next
four and a half centuries the course of Rabelais
criticism will be marked, to a large extent, by the
attempts of successive generations of readers to
come to terms, in the light of whatever ideology
prevailed at the time, with the political, religious,
and moral truths allegedly embedded in Rabe-
lais’s fictional text.
Not all of Rabelais’s contemporaries were
equally quick to rise to the challenge of the read-
ing strategy outlined in the prologue. The success
of Rabelais’s books upon their publication sug-
gests that the general public was content to take
them at face value and enjoy them first and fore-
most for their verbal exuberance and their comic
invention. Even Montaigne, so perspicacious a
reader on other occasions, ignores in Rabelais the
thinker in favor of the comic writer when he lists
him, somewhat dismissively, among those au-
thors whom he finds to be merely entertaining
(“simplement plaisants”). Only the participants in
the religious struggles ensuing from the spread
of evangelism and the hardening of their respec-
tive positions in the aftermath of the notorious
Affaire des Placards turn their attention to what
they believe to be Rabelais’s religious message.
Reducing the latter to the satire of religious au-
thority and the parody of biblical texts admittedly
pervading the novels, both the upholders of or-
thodoxy and those who call for reforms unex-
pectedly join forces in their vehement denunci-
ation of Rabelais’s religious leanings as
dangerously heretical or downright atheistic.
In the seventeenth century, the religious de-
bates subside in favor of a more literary ap-
proach. When La Bruyère declares much of Ra-
belais’s humor as fit only for the amusement of
the rabble (“la canaille”), he clearly has in mind
the recently defined norms of acceptable behav-
ior and good taste known to his contemporaries
as les bienséances. Above all, when he deplores
the “monstrous assemblage (“monstrueux assem-
blage”) of high seriousness and vulgarity within
the confines of one and the same work and de-
nounces such a juxtaposition of opposites as un-
acceptable to reason, he obviously does so in the
name of the Cartesian rationalism and classical
aesthetics that define the literary sensibility of his
generation. “Extravagant and unintelligible”
(“Extravagant et inintelligible”): Voltaire’s sim-
ilarly negative attitude bears witness to the per-
sistence of an essentially aesthetic reaction to Ra-
belais even in the Age of Enlightenment. Only
in the last years of the century will his work be
admired at last for the audacity of its religious
and political undertones by the French revolu-
tionaries who recognize in Rabelais an illustrious
predecessor in their own struggle for freedom,
equality, and justice.
The critical tide begins to turn. Yet not until
the following generation will Rabelais reach the
full stature of a writer of genius, emerging in the
Romantic imagination—alongside Dante and
Shakespeare—as one of the prophetic figures
guiding humanity at the dawn of the modern era.
Chateaubriand considers him the true founder of
French literature. Michelet finds in his work scin-
tillating glimmers of ultimate truth. Victor Hugo
is awed by the mysterious profundity of his
laughter and the epic grandeur of his vision.
Flaubert rereads him more often than any other
writer. Endowing him with a measure of their
own sensibility, Romantic readers are struck
above all, beyond the laughter and the echoes of
humanistic ideology, by the mythic dimension
and cosmic resonance of his fictional world.
Characteristically intuitive rather than analyti-
cal, the Romantic reaction to Rabelais was fol-
lowed, at the turn of the twentieth century, by
the first scholarly investigation of his work at the
hands of Abel Lefranc. In an early study, Lefranc
had noted that the various stages of the Picro-
choline War at the heart of Gargantua could be
followed, their mock-heroic treatment notwith-
standing, on any sixteenth-century map of the re-
gion surrounding Chinon. Similarly, he believed
he had traced the genesis of the entire episode to
nothing more momentous than a simple quarrel
between Rabelais’s father and one of his father’s
neighbors. Such discoveries reinforced Lefranc’s
conviction that Gargantua–Pantagruel belonged
essentially, despite its stylistic distortions, to the
tradition of realist fiction, as a document rooted
in the social and intellectual life of Rabelais’s
time and providing, in such allegedly serious and
humanistically inspired episodes as those de-
voted to education or to life at Thélème, direct
access to the author’s thought.
Throughout the first half of the century, Ra-
belais’s work continued to be studied from this

double perspective of historicity and realism.
This was the case even for Marxist critics for
whom Rabelais’s message was of course populist
rather than humanistic, but whose belief in his-
torical determinism encouraged a similar empha-
sis on meaning rather than form. When textual
analysis at long last found its place in Rabelais
criticism in the early 1960s, the change was
largely due to the influence of the German phi-
lologist Leo Spitzer, who in a virulent article on
“Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants’ ” had denounced
the Rabelaisants for endlessly dwelling on the
documentary significance of Rabelais’s work at
the expense of its artistic value and stifling the
text under the weight of misplaced erudition.
The immediate effect of Spitzer’s article was
to shift the focus of Rabelais criticism from in-
terpretation to formal analysis. Thus, some of the
most representative studies published in the
1960s, in England and the United States if not
yet in France, deal with such formal aspects as
narrative technique, comic devices, creative
imagination, the particular characteristics of Ra-
belais’s écriture, and the possibility of detecting
elements of structural unity in what looks at first
glance like a fragmented, unstructured series of
loosely connected episodes. The emphasis on
rhetoric and style in turn leads critics to question
the objectivity of the hitherto accepted distinction
between what is serious in Rabelais’s books and
what is merely playful. Even such pages as Gar-
gantua’s letter to Pantagruel celebrating the
dawn of a new spirit of inquiry after centuries of
intellectual stagnation are shown to bear the
stamp of Rabelais’s fantasy and comic exagger-
ation.
This new awareness of the essential ambiguity
of Rabelais’s text did not prevent more tradi-
tional scholars from pursuing their quest of what
V.-L. Saulnier was to call “the design of Rabe-
lais” (“le dessein de Rabelais”). Saulnier himself
did much to impose the symbolic interpretation
of Rabelais’s first two books as a fictional rep-
resentation of the humanist ideal, and of the
Third and Fourth Books as an allegorical ac-
count of the obstacles in the path of its realiza-
tion. In a series of studies remarkable for the
breadth of their erudition, Michael Screech sees
Rabelais’s adherence to the evangelical move-
ment as a key to various aspects of his thought.
Interpretations 129
From the same historicist perspective, other
scholars evaluate Rabelais’s debt to Plato and the
Platonic-Hermetic tradition. Still others, outside
the mainstream of academic criticism, investigate
connections between what they take to be Ra-
belais’s secret thought and various forms of es-
oteric initiation.
The publication in 1968 of Mikhail Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and His World in English translation
marks another significant turning point in Rabe-
lais criticism and sets it on a new course in two
somewhat incompatible directions. By insisting
on what Rabelais’s fiction owes to popular cul-
ture and folkloric tradition and by underscoring
the subversive nature of the carnivalesque spirit
permeating the text, Bakhtin’s book encouraged
a second wave of Marxist interpretations in terms
of class struggle and Rabelais’s alleged opposi-
tion to the rise of capitalistic individualism. On
the other hand, Bakhtin’s effort to minimize the
importance of Rabelais’s humanistic message, to-
gether with his view of Rabelais’s novel as a pol-
yphonic text resonating with a concert of voices
from which the author’s own voice was conspic-
uously absent, led such disciples as Michel Beau-
jour to bring out in Le jeu de Rabelais the con-
sequences of Bakhtin’s approach and to question
the legitimacy of seeing in Rabelais’s references
to the political, religious, and other cultural con-
cerns the expression of the author’s ideological
intentions of any kind whatever, rather than
viewing them as elements of a rhetorical game
in the framework of a text whose very essence
lies in its playfulness and its refusal to signify.
This conception of Rabelais’s fiction as a
purely ludic enterprise, however strongly rein-
forced by poststructuralist notions of textuality
and of the self-referential nature of literature, did
not prevent such staunch traditionalists as Mi-
chael Screech and his followers from persisting
in their conviction that a historical and scholarly
approach was the one and only path to valid in-
terpretation. More moderate scholars, such as
Gérard Defaux, continued (and continue) to de-
fend the rights of historical criticism, were it only
as an indispensable precaution against anachro-
nistic misreadings and adventurous claims. Com-
bining thematic and stylistic concerns, language
took center stage in the two following decades,
in the wake of François Rigolot’s seminal work,
130 Irony
Les langages de Rabelais. Studies of such as-
pects of the problématique du langage as the re-
lationship between words and things, the relative
status of linguistic signs in the act of communi-
cation, and their alleged inability to signify with-
out ambivalence and ambiguity have stressed Ra-
belais’s uncanny propensity to anticipate many
of the contemporary issues debated within the
context of semiotics and linguistic structuralism.
Articles on the recurring motif of thirst, on the
function of food, on the status of women, and
on the origin of Rabelais’s giants have reexam-
ined these traditional themes from new, often in-
terdisciplinary perspectives. A number of inter-
textual readings have rethought the old questions
of source and influence with a greater awareness
of their subtle complexity. As for the notion of
meaning itself, it too has continued to serve as
an object of critical reflection, though no longer
as the expression of the author’s thought, but
rather, in the light of structuralism and reception
theory, as a subjective and “plural” product of
the act of reading.
Differences in tone rather than substance char-
acterize Rabelais criticism in the most recent
phase of its evolution. The cast of players in the
ongoing debate remains essentially the same, as
does their basic critical stance. Rabelais contin-
ues to be read in historical context by traditional
scholars, and from an increasingly interdiscipli-
nary perspective by critics favoring a more mod-
ern approach informed by new critical method-
ologies. But the near-hostility that had marked
previous polemical confrontations between tra-
ditionalists and innovators seems to have given
way to a new spirit of synthesis and conciliation,
a welcome willingness to moderate the reduc-
tionist intransigence of their earlier positions and
to acknowledge the validity of contrasting points
of view. Critics of postmodernist persuasion now
seem more ready to admit that Rabelais’s text is
not exclusively self-referential but that it is also,
at least to some extent, a representation of the
author’s world. Distrust of authorial intention
and the recent emphasis on ambiguity and poly-
valence of meaning are no longer seen as nec-
essarily justifying the rejection of all attempts at
interpretation. Even the possibility of a sustan-
tificque mouelle or marrow at the core of Rabe-
lais’s work is no longer rejected out of hand, al-
though there is a growing suspicion, among
traditionalists and innovators alike, that it may
not lie in the revelation of any momentous truths
illuminating the mysteries of human existence,
but rather in the Pantagruelistic spirit of toler-
ance, hope, and good-will with which Panurge
and Pantagruel set out on their voyage to the
Oracle of the Divine Bottle, and the ideal reader
on his quest for the moral message of Rabelais’s
book.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais:
Essai sur Rabelais (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1969);
François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, ER 10
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972); Michael Andrew
Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1979); Leo Spitzer, “Rabelais et les ‘rabelais-
ants,’ ” SF 4.12 (September–December): 401–23.
Bruno Braunrot
IRONY Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the Rab-
elaisian carnivalesque, though limited by its
Marxist perspective, offered a theoretical frame-
work for the study of ironic structures in Rabe-
lais’s works that was not dependent on a reader’s
subjective assessment of authorial intention.
Rather, the text’s own interdiscursive structures
of discourse and counterdiscourse constitute the
paradigm in play in his work of disjunction and
dissociation between elements that reciprocally
undermine or subvert one another. The study of
ironic structures affords an important supplement
to historical scholarship, which, though indispen-
sable, can err in the interpretative process when
it infers meaning from the mere spotting of a
source without reference to how it is functioning
in the text.
Let us look first at some examples of “ironic
structures” and how they function to produce
meaning through the juxtaposition or interaction
between an ideological discourse at the text’s
surface and a counterdiscourse that undercuts it.
At times the reader hears multiple, sometimes
contradictory, voices speaking in Rabelais’s text.
The first and obvious example of an ironic struc-
ture is Rabelais’s use of a fictive narrating per-
sona in the first three books—Alcofrybas Na-
sier—who declares the presence of a new kind
of literary voice addressing a fictive reader. This

voice is dialogic and inaugurates a new role for
the empirical reader of Rabelais’s books. Read-
ing Rabelais is henceforth a dialogic experience,
giving rise to reading as an active and interactive
process. Alcofrybas is an ambiguous persona
who is and is not Rabelais the author, part char-
latan, part fairgrounds mountebank out to gull
the drunk and poxy fictive reader, from whom
real readers dissociate themselves in the process
of teasing out the text’s meanings. Thus, in the
prologue to Gargantua, Alcofrybas sets up am-
bivalent relations between the text and its read-
ers, subjecting them to ironic praise and blame
(“Beuveurs tres illustres, Verolez tres precieux—
Most noble boozers and you my very esteemed
and poxy friends”), proceeding to invite them to
interpret his book in a higher sense, then putting
in question the venerable tradition of allegorical
systems of reading and interpretation. Rabelais
ironizes the tradition of allegorical interpretation,
mocking it, problematizing it, and placing the
reader in the position of having to come to terms
with a text that mocks the reader, mocks itself,
and yet manages to intrigue the reader to figure
out the seriousness that subsists in the shadows
behind the comedy. Indeed, that delicate balance
between earnestness and jest is not the least in-
appropriate definition of irony.
Gargantua, chapter 8, contains a description
of Gargantua’s device or impresa, which is a
perfect example of an ironic image hovering in-
definably between seriousness and jest. Rabelais
describes the “Platonic” Androgyne but modifies
it so that the heads are not Janus-faced but are
turned toward one another—“the beast with two
backs”—and juxtaposes it to the Pauline text
“Charity Seeketh Not Its Own.” The possible in-
tertexts include not only Plato and Saint Paul
but also Ficinian Neoplatonism. The figure and
the Pauline sentence constitute a polysemous
conjunction of incompatible elements, a figure of
Rabelaisian irony itself. Image and text recipro-
cally subvert one another and rather than resolve
into a univocal message, inscribe an ironic image
en abyme of endless unanswered questions and
ambiguities.
Gargantua’s letter on education (P 8) has been
a focus of critical argument with respect to irony.
Long considered as Rabelais’s serious program
for humanistic study, some critics (e.g., Brault,
Irony 131
Defaux, Rigolot) have attempted to read it iron-
ically as a parody of humanist discourse. On the
other hand, the letter is not ironic because it is
not overtly marked as ironic discourse, nor does
it contain semiotic markers referring elsewhere
inside Rabelais’s text. What is ironic is that the
letter in its high seriousness is juxtaposed to its
antithesis, the arrival of Panurge and his meeting
with Pantagruel in chapter 9. This is indeed an
ironic structure, built on oppositions that under-
cut one another. Although the letter inscribes ex-
tratextual associations (e.g., humanist learning,
Latinate diction) and ideological traces (hierar-
chy, legitimate marriage and paternity, estab-
lished religious values, and the obedience of sons
to fathers), the meeting with Panurge is a fic-
tional challenge to the official ideology repre-
sented by the letter. Panurge’s essential role in
Pantagruel is to be the trickster, the carnival-
esque reverser of hierarchies, and, in sum, the
instrument of Rabelais’s challenge to dominant
ideologies, established hierarchies and authori-
ties, the subversive counterdiscourse of the lower
body that is a necessary component of Rabelais’s
comic vision in Pantagruel.
This paradigm of subversion of ideological
discourse is present to a greater or lesser degree
in all four canonical books. In the Third Book,
the prologue, the Praise of Debts, the consulta-
tions with the diviners, and the legal, medical,
and religious authorities, are polyvalent texts sus-
ceptible of being plurally read. For example, the
Praise of Debts must be obliquely read as a sa-
tirical eulogy of a vice it only appears to praise.
In this sense, to condemn Panurge for his vice is
also to condemn contemporary monarchs and no-
blemen for their conspicuous consumption on
credit. At the same time, Panurge’s flights of
rhetoric propose a fantastic vision of universal
exchange and fecundity. The entire episode is
fundamentally ambiguous in that it holds several
contradictory discourses in balance. Pantagruel’s
condemnation of Panurge on the ethical level
does not at all detract from the validity of Pan-
urge’s vision of the cosmic harmony of a world
of borrowing and lending. This duplicitous text
contains what Bakhtin has termed “double-
voiced discourse,” which serves the character
who is speaking and the refracted intention of the
author.
132 Italy
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de François
Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen âge et sous
la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard,
1970); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Em-
erson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Car-
nival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990); Jerome Schwartz, Irony and
Ideology: Structures of Subversion in Rabelais (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Jerome Schwartz
ITALY Before his first visit in 1534, Rabelais
was well acquainted with Italy. By 1524 he had
sent the Pope his first request for regularization
of his monastic situation. Much of the legal and
medical erudition he was acquiring was the work
of Italian humanists, disseminated by Italian
printers. Two of his earliest scholarly publi-
cations (1532), the editions of Manardi and Cus-
pidius, draw on this erudition: the Roman legal
texts reproduce earlier Italian editions; the med-
ical text reveals how much he revered the letters
of this Ferrarese doctor; and later editions of his
Hippocrates include material from Manardi’s
pupil Brasavola. Rabelais had also read widely
in Italian vernacular literature, as shown in his
first comic publication of 1532, which shows
knowledge not only of Teofilo Folengo’s mac-
aronic epic but also of novellisti like Masuccio
and probably Boccaccio. His language in Pan-
tagruel already includes numerous Italianisms.
The same book also reveals early evidence of
anti-italianism: he sides with the mos gallicus of
Guillaume Budé and André Tiraqueau against
Italian legal commentators; he places several me-
dieval Italian popes in Hell; and the catalogue of
Saint-Victor makes much mockery of Italy and
Rome, her poiltronismus (laziness), her fanfares,
her petarrades (flatulence).
The first short visit of three months in early
1534 gave Rabelais the privileged opportunity to
discover Italy in a diplomatic entourage. He wit-
nessed the unsuccessful attempts of his patron,
Jean du Bellay, to prevent the excommunication
of Henry VIII by the College of Cardinals, and
praised du Bellay’s eloquence in his preface to
Marliani. He participated with du Bellay in ex-
cavating and collecting antiquities, and in meas-
uring the topography of ancient Rome, on which
he planned to write a book. On his return to
Lyon, passing through Florence, Rabelais aban-
doned his own project and instead published an
edition of Marliani’s new Topographia, with cor-
rections based on his own notes and with a na-
tionalistic dedication to du Bellay, in which he
minimizes the novelty of what Italy has revealed
to him.
The elevation of du Bellay to the purple the
following year gave Rabelais the opportunity for
another longer visit to Italy, from July 1535 until
Easter 1536, traveling outwards via Ferrara
(where he probably met Manardi and later Bra-
savola) and by sea to Pesaro. Rabelais and his
patron renewed contact with academic circles in
Rome, notably Paolo Giovio and a group of neo-
Latin poets. Rome proved an ideal observatory
of European politics for Rabelais, news of which
he sent in many letters (of which three survive)
to his religious superior, Geoffroy d’Estissac,
with details about the rivalries of Italian families,
preparations for the visit of Charles V, news
from England and even from the Near East. His
sources are published newsletters and no doubt
the gossip of the embassy, but he does not pass
on any privileged information, and some of his
facts are wrong. He makes much, however, of
any reverses suffered by the imperial camp and
reveals his patriotic leanings. One of his major
concerns is his request for papal absolution from
the crime of apostasy, but he tells d’Estissac
nothing of his tactical errors in this undertaking,
nor of his moves to transfer his religious alle-
giance to du Bellay. Although his patron left
Rome secretly in late February, Rabelais proba-
bly stayed on with the household until mid-April
and was witness to the emperor’s entry to the
city.
Rabelais made a brief visit to Italy in 1538
when he attended the summit meeting in Nice
between the king, Pope, and emperor, before
making a prolonged stay in Piedmont in 1540–
42, in the household of the cardinal’s brother
Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey.
While it is not known that he had acted as doctor
to Jean in Rome, it is almost certain that he did
so for Guillaume and his wife in Turin. He was
there by the summer of 1540 and stayed until the
winter of 1542, when he accompanied his seri-

ously ill patient to Lyon and witnessed his death
in January 1543, famously described in chapter
21 of the Third Book and chapter 27 of the
Fourth Book. In Turin he had witnessed Lan-
gey’s attempts to make the new province secure
and to relieve famine. This example probably in-
fluenced the account of the fortification of Cor-
inth and of the good government of Dipsodie in
the prologue to the Third Book and chapter 1.
His account of Langey’s military achievements,
Les Stratagemes, was published in Lyon in Latin
and French, although no copy has been traced.
In Turin, Rabelais was in contact with the French
ambassador in Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, with
whom he had been to Rome, and who consulted
him about rare plants and about a difficult legal,
medical, and diplomatic question involving the
minimum duration of pregnancy. He was in con-
tact with the neo-Latin poet and magistrate in
Chambéry, Jean de Boyssonné, who wrote po-
ems on the early death of Rabelais’s natural in-
fant son, Théodule, and on the death in Turin of
Langey’s wife (and Rabelais’s patient) Anne de
Créqui. He also attended the degree ceremony in
medicine of his friend Guillaume Bigot at the
University of Turin reopened by Langey.
Rabelais made his final visit to Italy in 1547–
49, once again in the company of Jean du Bellay
and explicitly as his doctor. He participated in
the archeological activities of his patron and as-
sisted him in preparing a festival to celebrate the
birth of Henry II’s second son, Louis, in March
1549. His account of this festival, La Scioma-
chie, was published in Lyon, drawing on the re-
cent royal entry to Lyon and on a contemporary
Florentine newsletter. This important piece of
writing highlights du Bellay’s successful pro-
motion of the French cause in Rome, as well as
Rabelais’s interest in costume, military science,
and banquets. Rabelais returned to France with
his ailing patient in September 1549 but probably
did not return to Rome with him in November
for the conclave. He continued to follow Italian
politics, especially the Gallican crisis of 1551
arising from the Parma wars, as well as growing
Italy 133
French hostility to the Council of Trent. The
Papimanie episode in the Fourth Book reflects
the nationalist mood in France during this crisis,
and the Ringing Island (Isle Sonante) episode
in the Fifth Book reveals a greater hostility to
the Roman Church than in his earlier writings:
some critics have interpreted each episode as ev-
idence of Rabelais’s role as royal propagandist.
Rabelais’s five books and minor works reveal
the breadth of his reading of Italian fiction (es-
pecially Francesco Colonna, whom he translates
in the Fifth Book), short stories, mock epics and
humanist polygraphs, and Platonists. The in-
creasing number of Italianisms in his vocabulary
also reflect his knowledge of the language, and,
if the 1550 royal privilege for his works is to be
believed, he had published in “Thuscan.” During
his career, he had had to seek permission from
Vatican tribunals to change religious order, to
study at university, to practice medicine, to ac-
quire benefices, and to be absolved from apos-
tasy, besides requests from his own natural chil-
dren for legitimization. Despite his occasional
mockery of Italy in his writing, he was greatly
indebted to Italian scholarship and fascinated by
Roman antiquities and festivals. However, there
is no evidence of an interest in Italian Renais-
sance art (see the comic views of Bernard Lar-
don in 4BK 11).
Readings: Victor Louis Bourrilly, Guillaume Du
Bellay, Seigneur de Langey, 1491–1543 (Paris, 1905);
V.-L. Bourrilly ed., Rabelais, Lettres écrites d’Italie
(Paris, 1910); R. A. Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1991); R. A. Cooper, Litterœ in tempore
belli (Geneva: Droz, 1997); R. A. Cooper, “Rabelais,
Jean Du Bellay, et la crise gallicane,” Rabelais pour
le XXIe siècle, special number, ER 33 (1998): 299–
325; R. A. Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Rabe-
lais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Robert
Marichal, “Le dernier séjour de Rabelais à Rome,”
Congrès de Tours et Poitiers de l’Association Guil-
laume Budé (Paris, 1954); Arthur Heulhard, Rabelais,
ses voyages en Italie, son exil à Metz (Paris, 1891).
Richard Cooper
 J
JANOTUS DE BRAGMARDO Episodic
character in Gargantua (17–19), whose plea for
the return of the bells of Notre Dame, which the
giant has stolen to put on his mare’s neck, is one
of Rabelais’s finest comic monologues. Later
editions censored Rabelais’s first version of this
episode, in which Janotus is a Sorbonne theo-
logian, replacing theologien by sophiste and thus
losing the main polemical point.
The stealing of the bells, an incident in the
Grandes croniques (OC 161–62), is the pretext
for comprehensive and devastating satire, first of
the people of Paris (“tant sot, tant badault, et tant
inepte . . . ,” 17) and then of Sorbonne theologi-
ans in general. Rabelais ensures that Janotus’s
speech in chapter 19 will be pointless by having
Gargantua return the bells beforehand (18). Jan-
otus is lazy, interested only in his material com-
forts, ignorant even of the Latin he uses every
day, stupid, and a totally inept orator. His nine
“arguments” for the return of the bells include:
we need the bells to preserve the vines from bad
weather (an old superstition; i.e., wine is the
most important thing in a theologian’s life); we
can offer you pardons (indulgences) if you return
the bells (i.e., pardons have more to do with
profit than with religion); our Faculté needs the
bells just as much as your mare does (i.e., the-
ologians are no smarter than Gargantua’s mare).
Janotus’s speech violates every rule of Cicer-
onian rhetoric which every schoolboy knew by
heart; it has neither invention (coherent subject
matter), disposition (arrangement), elocution
(style), memory (he seems quite proud of his
poor memory), or delivery (he punctuates it with
coughing and spitting). His style, in both French
and Latin, is a mishmash of correct (“Reddite
que sunt Cesaris Cesari”) and incorrect (“ego ha-
bet bon uino”), lofty (“une ville sans cloches est
comme un aveugle sans baston . . .”) and collo-
quial (“Ha, ha, ha. C’est parlé cela”). Almost
every sentence contains a pun, a literary refer-
ence, or an in-joke that would have been quite
clear to Rabelais’s intended readers.
Gérard Defaux has tried to identify Janotus
with the Sorbonne syndic Noël Béda, already
lampooned in P 7, but the more important em-
phasis is on comedy. Janotus is not just despi-
cable and inept—he is hilariously funny, and at
the beginning of chapter 20 the heartiest laughter
anywhere in Rabelais is the reaction of Ponocra-
tes and Eudémon to his speech. Like many a
Molière character, Janotus sometimes speaks the
truth unknowingly (“Reason? . . . We don’t use
that around here” [GP 48]) and is so blissfully
self-satisfied that we are compelled to laugh with
him as well as at him. He is at the same time a
lamentably incompetent orator and a consum-
mate farce actor, as several reminiscences of
Maistre Pierre Pathelin in the episode remind us.
If we remember the rough punishment of the
Ecolier Limousin in P 6, we may wonder at the
generous recompensing of a potential burner of
heretics. Perhaps Rabelais still thought, in 1533–
34, that laughter could be powerful enough to
counter the forces of repression threatening to
destroy evangelical humanism?
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Janotus de Brag-
mardo in the Limelight (Gargantua, ch. 19),” FR 72
(1998): 229–37; Gérard Defaux, “Rabelais et les
cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28.
Barbara C. Bowen
JEWS Rabelais’s novels display definite fa-
miliarity with the Jewish mores and culture of
his time. Besides numerous Hebrew puns and
allusions to the Bible and the Talmud, one finds
more esoteric notions revealing a certain degree
of acquaintance with Jewish mysticism and even
hermetic texts such as the Zohar. Rabelaisian

characters often mention Jewish law and kabbal-
ists, Massoretes, and Marranes. Gargantua’s hu-
manist program admonishes the study of He-
brew, also advising visits of Talmudists’ and
kabbalists’ works (P 8). The allusions to the Jew-
ish canon are so numerous and precise that one
can deduce Rabelais’s real involvement in the
study of Hebrew and Jewish gnosis. Yet most of
the time this knowledge is conveyed with irony.
He rewrites a jocular version of the origin of cir-
cumcision (3BK 18), jokes about the rules of ko-
sher food (4BK 40), or about oaths more judaico
(3BK 19).
The text refers a few times to Marranes, or
converted Jews, a result of the sixteenth-century
royal politic of expulsions. Indeed, Rabelais
mentions by name Antoine Saporta, a Marrane
friend from Montpellier (3BK 34). But the Jew-
ish groups named most often are the kabbalists
and the Massoretes.
The kabbala, an ancient oral tradition claim-
ing lineage as far back as Abraham and Moses,
is elaborated as a philosophical and metaphysical
system that bridges biblical and Neoplatonic
thought. Although Jewish mysticism had trickled
from Spain to the rest of Europe in the ninth and
twelfth centuries, there were few initiates. How-
ever, in the fourteenth century, the kabbala took
the Jewish communities by storm, and interest in
this new discipline spread throughout the Chris-
tian world in the sixteenth. When introducing
hermetic terms that belong to the speculative
kabbala, such as Belima, Ruach, and Cheli, Ra-
belais’s text echoes the respect found for this
mystical discipline in Reuchlin’s De arte Cabal-
istica, or Pico de la Mirandola’s Heptaplus. The
tone, however, is mocking for the practical kab-
bala, which dallied in magic and astrology, and
took advantage of credulous people. This dy-
namic between fascination and cautiousness is
consistent throughout the various books.
Similarly, respect tinged with amusement is
the treatment bestowed upon the other group of
Jewish “interpreters of the law,” the Massoretes.
The Massorah is an oral transmission of anything
that concerns the form of the words of the re-
vealed text, both the vocalic and consonantal
structure (diacritic signs, divisions into sections,
etc.). The grammarians who took care of codi-
fying this structure, particularly infralinear vo-
Judiciary 135
calic punctuation which appeared only in written
Hebrew around the seventh century, used all
imaginable measures to guarantee the exact
transmission of the text, even at the cost of im-
mense toil. Letters were counted, words were
counted, and all peculiarities were noted. The
Massoretes are the Jewish commentators who
have an intimate knowledge of symbol in the He-
brew language. His allusions to Rabbi Kimhi de
Narbonne and Rabbi Ibn Ezra show that Rabelais
was familiar with the work, or role, of these er-
udite commentators.
Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’hébreu chez Ra-
belais,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire (1968);
David Morris, “The Place of Jewish Law and Tradition
in the Work of François Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); Ger-
shom Scholem, Les grands courants de la mystique
juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); Ilana Zinguer, ed., L’hébreu
au temps de la Renaissance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).
Katia Campbell
JUDICIARY Rabelais launched a caustic cri-
tique of the judicial practices of his time. Since
Rabelais’s public was largely composed of the
newly emerging bourgeois class whose members
aspired to public office (especially in the judicial
sphere), it is not surprising that his novels re-
peatedly refer to legal occupations such as
judges, lawyers, or other judiciary occupations.
From Judge Bridoye (3BK 39–43), who ren-
dered justice by rolling the dice to the Chicanous
bailiffs (4BK 12–16) in the land of Procuration,
all the legal episodes in Rabelais’s works tend to
be critical. Often this critique of legal practices
is linked to monetary profit. The “Chats fourrez”
(5BK 11–15) incident alludes to the notorious
abuses of the period’s legal bureaucracy and the
pervasiveness of a system of bribery that sold
justice to the highest bidder. Furthermore, eco-
nomic and judicial aspects often overlap owing
to the new social reality that the sale of offices
respresented during the Renaissance. It was
common practice for the king to sell judicial of-
fices to the new “robin” class in order to replen-
ish his coffers. For this reason, the judiciary bu-
reaucracy grew rapidly during the first half of the
sixteenth century. For example, in 1546, a Ve-
netian ambassador in Paris wrote that “judicial
offices are unlimited and augment everyday: law-
136 Judiciary
yers of the court in even the smallest village, tax
receivers, treasurers, counselors, presidents of
courts of justice, ‘maı̂tres des requêtes’ . . . of
which half of them would suffice.” Corruption
among the diverse professions of justice became
so prevalent in the sixteenth century that Rabe-
lais found in them an easy target.
From the Pantagruel (1532) to the Fifth Book
(1564), we see a progressive increase in the por-
trayal of the justice system and its administrators.
The best known example is undoubtedly the ep-
isode of Judge Bridoye. The judge finds himself
on trial for rolling dice to reach his verdicts. In
charge of his own defense, Bridoye invokes a
pure linguistic understanding and application of
the legal texts. He plays on words and attempts
to exonerate himself by demonstrating that he
simply applied the letter of the law as contained
in the Latin locution alea judiciorum (the chance
of judgments), a popular legal metaphor. We
know that the French translation of this Latin ex-
pression (“the dice of judgments”) was a well-
known pun at the time Rabelais wrote his Third
Book. As usual, Rabelais incorporates the soci-
olinguistic practices of his time into his novel.
Yet there is more than a simple wordplay in this
incident, for Rabelais extends his critique to at-
tack the foundation of the entire legal system in
sixteenth-century France. Indeed, the very notion
of bureaucratic and legal rationality bears the
brunt of his critiques in this episode where a
judge successfully renders justice for decades
armed with the most subjective tools that re-
quired no skill or legal training.
In a similar vein, the key chapters about the
Chats fourrez in the Fifth Book expand upon
many of the judicial issues already raised in the
Fourth Book. The “Grippeminaudière” justice
(5BK 11–13) offers a troubling resemblance to
the “Rodilardicque” justice of the Fourth Book.
A look at the historical and social context of Ra-
belais’s mockery of the judicial system sheds
light on his observations. The venality of lawyers
had reached new heights, and complaints of cor-
ruption were louder than ever. To give an ex-
ample of such a contentious issue, the royal ad-
ministration created a new judiciary profession
in order to expedite judgments of common law.
These presidial judges instated by Henry II rep-
resented an attempt to address ethical issues in
local and regional courts. However, the king’s
decentralization of justice did just the opposite
and unwittingly encouraged corruption. The ex-
traordinary power given to the presidial judges—
convicted individuals had no recourse for ap-
peal—produced a new twist where “laws are like
a spider’s web”: “foolish flies and little butterflies
get caught in them, [but] big horseflies break
them . . . and go through” (5BK 12; GP 548).
The unchecked power given to these new
judges finds a parallel in the episode where Frère
Jean and Panurge find themselves in front of
Grippe-Minaud. The absence of Pantagruel in
this episode enables the presidial judge to con-
sider our two companions as vagabonds and
therefore subject to common law. They are in-
dicted on criminal charges, like the “brigands,”
poor vagabonds, and other “pieds pouldreux”
(5BK 11) responsible for all manner of real or
imagined infractions that the presidial judges re-
served the right to prosecute. As Grippe-Minaud
says: “We don’t go hunting big-time thieves and
tyrants. . . . They’re too hard to digest . . . and
they make us sick . . . but you others, you nice
little innocents . . . you’re perfectly harmless”
(5BK 12).
Perhaps echoing the legal training of his
younger years, Rabelais drew many of his judi-
cial references directly from compilations of ju-
diciary loci communes, especially the Communes
juris sententiae by Bellonus, the Lexicon by Al-
bericus, the Speculum judiciale by Durand, and
the De nobilitate by Tiraqueau. Judicial expres-
sions abound in the episode of Judge Bridoye,
but Rabelais invariably bends and twists them to
produce a comic effect. He aims to demonstrate
how easily subjective decisions can be dissimu-
lated behind adages, glosses, and other legal aph-
orisms. These linguistic deformations used by
judges, like the Latin used to render justice to an
uncomprehending defendant, give an ironic and
comic aspect to most of the incidents involving
the courts in Rabelais’s novels. All these mock-
ing references to the judicial process and the le-
gal profession constitute a strong satire of the
entire legal system of the time.
Readings: J. Duncan Derrett, “Rabelais’ Legal
Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963):
111–71; Edwin Duval, “The Judge Bridoye, Panta-
gruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” ER

17 (1983): 37–60; Michael A Screech, “The Legal
Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bridoye in the
Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ER 5 (1964): 175–95.
Philippe Desan
JUSTE, FRANÇOIS (fl. 1524–47) Printer/
bookseller in Lyon who appears to have been
Rabelais’s printer of choice for Pantagruel and
Juste, François 137
Gargantua, 1535–42. Juste worked from 1543
with his son-in-law Pierre de Tours, who also
printed Rabelais.
Reading: Y. de la Perrière, Supplément provisoire
à la bibliographie lyonnaise du Président Baudrier,
pt. 1, fols. 85–116 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale,
1967).
Stephen Rawles
 K
KABBALA (CABALA, QABBALAH) The
Hebrew word for Jewish mysticism; references
to it appear in several of the books. It means
tradition because Jewish adherents believed it
was handed down orally alongside the Torah
from Mount Sinai. In fact, kabbala was highly
influenced by Neoplatonism, and the two main
books available in Rabelais’s time, Sefer Yetzirah
(Book of Creation) and Zohar (Book of Splen-
dor), are both medieval. Kabbala is also a highly
literary form of mysticism, focusing on letters
and language. For example, the kabbalist prac-
tice of gematria consisted of adding the number
values of the letters of certain passages of the
Torah to predict the future. Or letters of words
could be rearranged to uncover some hidden
meaning. This focus on the letters and language,
as well as the Neoplatonic underpinnings, made
kabbala particularly attractive to Renaissance
humanists. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
studied kabbala and considered it necessary to a
humanist education; his development of a spe-
cifically Christian kabbala sparked an interest
that became increasingly widespread among the
humanists.
Like other forms of mysticism, kabbala’s ul-
timate aim is union with the divine; this union is
often described in terms of sexual union or
drunkenness, two subjects explored throughout
the five books. But Rabelais seems to have fol-
lowed Pico’s lead in focusing on kabbala. He in-
cluded its study as a necessary part of the hu-
manist education in Gargantua’s letter to
Pantagruel (P 8). He also showed familiarity
with specific kabbalistic ideas. The mystical
quest is often compared to a voyage in search of
wisdom, and Panurge in the Fourth Book sets
out on a voyage in search of wisdom. But Ra-
belais related Panurge’s voyage to kabbala in two
ways. First, the voyagers are seeking l’Oracle de
la Dive Bacbuc (the Oracle of the Holy Bacbuc);
baqbuq is Hebrew for bottle. But more impor-
tantly the celebration held before they set out in-
cludes the singing of Psalm 114, “When Israel
went out of Egypt” (4BK 1). Kabbalists believed
that historical events were constantly repeated in
the human soul, and the exodus from Egypt, per-
ceived as the fundamental event of Jewish his-
tory, was the ultimate symbol of their mystical
experience of the divine. On the voyage Panta-
gruel and Panurge stop at the Island of Ruach
(4BK 43–44). The Hebrew word ruahfi means
both “spirit” and “wind.” Rabelais identified it
with vent. On the other hand, kabbalists main-
tained that there were three levels of soul—ne-
fesh, the vital spirit in all humanity; ruahfi , the
spirit on a higher level; and neshamah, the pure
soul that is capable of union with the divine. As
the median level, the adherent had to pass
through ruahfi to make himself ready for the state
of neshamah, just as Panurge had to pass through
the different (but concretized) disciplines of hu-
man and humanist knowledge to prepare himself
for the oracle.
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-
tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin,
“The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Panta-
gruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-
Levi and Gale Sigal (New York: AMS Press, 1992).
Sheila J. Rabin
KISSARSE See Baisecul and Humevesne
KNOWLEDGE Rabelais’s fictions explore in
an open-ended way various conceptions of
knowledge that were available at the time. Ra-
belais has no single term for “knowledge.”
Rather, he uses various terms that refer to dif-
ferent dimensions of cognition. His most general

term for knowledge and learning is le savoir. By
la science (Latin scientia) he and his contempo-
raries usually mean knowledge of a theoretical,
abstract kind, such as law or mathematics, as op-
posed to l’art (Latin ars), which is knowledge of
a more practical, applied kind, such as medicine,
military skills, agriculture, architecture, paint-
ing, or divination. La philosophie tends to be an
umbrella category for investigations of all human
and natural phenomena, while la doctrine is usu-
ally the teaching of a particular philosophical
school or sect, especially an ancient one.
Certain junctures in Rabelais’s diegesis ad-
dress the question of knowledge with particular
force: Gargantua’s letter urging his son Panta-
gruel to obtain education (P 8); Pantagruel’s
comic demonstrations of learning and wisdom (P
10–12, 17–18); the two educations received by
Gargantua (G 13–14, 20–22); Panurge’s re-
course to divination and other methods in order
to discover if he should marry (3BK); the en-
counters with unknown peoples on the voyage to
the oracle of the Bottle Goddess (4BK). But even
outside these episodes, the question of knowl-
edge is constantly evoked. For example, what do
blue and white mean (G 9)? Can a pregnancy last
eleven months (G 3)? (Women generally figure
as objects of knowledge but not as knowing sub-
jects.) No single concept or theory of knowledge
emerges unchallenged, though some are repre-
sented as particularly prestigious, such as the as-
sumption that “science” leads to wisdom and
scientia to sapientia: both Pantagruel and Gar-
gantua are presented—with some equivocation,
one might argue—as being made wise by the
knowledge they acquire through education. This
assumption, shared by many humanists but in-
creasingly questioned later in the century by the
likes of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Char-
ron, had been given its most celebrated formu-
lation by Cicero: “wisdom [sapientia] is . . .
knowledge [scientia] of divine and human things,
and of the causes which control them” (On Duty,
2.2.5). On the other hand, Rabelais’s chronicles
are full of characters who are not made wise by
knowledge. Contemporary anxiety about this is
summarized in the scholastic axiom that Gargan-
tua quotes to Pantagruel: “knowledge [science]
Knowledge 139
without conscience is but ruin to the soul” (P 8).
In other words, it is dangerous to separate knowl-
edge from ethics: this belief was even more
deeply held in Rabelais’s time than in our own.
Rabelais’s fictions also explore problems of
epistemology. How do we acquire knowledge?
And how reliable is it? Numerous means of ac-
quiring knowledge are explored, in both comic
and serious registers, often in both simultane-
ously. The dominant means is through authority,
that is, through the authoritative texts of Greek
and Roman antiquity. These are constantly cited
for the knowledge or pseudoknowledge they con-
tain. Another way of acquiring knowledge is to
get back in touch with a spiritual or metaphysical
level of reality with which we tend to lose con-
tact in our everyday lives. This Platonic and Neo-
platonic route to knowledge is often described in
a way that lends it prestige and credibility, es-
pecially in the Third Book (e.g., 13, 21, 37) and
the Fourth Book (26–28). On the other hand,
many other episodes are implicitly underpinned
by the more down-to-earth Aristotelian sense of
epistemology that was common currency in Ra-
belais’s day: knowledge in the intellect arises
from experience, from data supplied by the
senses—how else can the infant Gargantua dis-
cover the best objects with which to wipe his
bottom (G 12)? Rather more unsettling is the un-
resolved skepticism, the doubt about the possi-
bility of knowledge, that is later introduced
through the Pyrrhonist philosopher Trouillogan
(3BK 35–36). Overall, the quest for knowledge
is represented as being fraught with trouble and
yet joyously irresistible: “What’s the harm in al-
ways knowing and always learning, whether
from a clot or a pot?” (3BK 16).
Readings: Terence Cave, Pré-Histoires: Textes
troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: Droz,
1999); Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Fran-
ciscans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Jean Plat-
tard, L’oeuvre de Rabelais (sources, invention et
composition) (Paris: Champion, 1910); Michael A.
Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979); André
Tournon, ‘En sens agile’: Les acrobaties de l’esprit
selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1995).
Neil Kenny
 L
LANGUAGE Rabelais’s linguistic range puz-
zles and fascinates: it evokes “the sphinx or the
chimera, a monster with a hundred heads, a hun-
dred languages” (Michelet) as well as an “abyss
of knowledge” (P 8). His cornucopian lexicon
(Cave 1979) encompasses a rich variety of
sources from both high and low culture: daily
practices, popular stories, proverbs and common
sayings, sotties, farces (Pathelin), and mystery
plays; chivalric romances and other ancient and
modern literary works. Rabelais borrowed words
and phrases from numerous French authors, in-
cluding Jean de Meung, Jean Lemaire de Belges,
François Villon, and Clément Marot. He was
also greatly influenced by many classical authors
(especially Lucian, Plutarch, and Pliny the El-
der) and contemporary humanists (including
Erasmus and Guillaume Budé). On the model
of his own giants, Rabelais’s appetite for words
knows no limits. His vocabulary crosses all fields
of knowledge, including architecture, botany,
commerce and industry, history, medicine, mu-
sic, military science, navigation, and zoology,
and all kinds of cultural and social practices (Sai-
néan). His insatiable thirst for words has contrib-
uted to the romantic myth of the intoxicated gen-
ius. Although the poet’s “debauchery” took place
in his imagination, readers are still dazzled today
by the power of a language that seizes and con-
founds you, intoxicates and disgusts you (Sainte-
Beuve 1876).
As a writer, Rabelais paid a great deal of at-
tention to the formal aspects of his books. He
corrected the text of the various editions pub-
lished during his lifetime with meticulous care.
The deliberate changes he made in spelling and
grammar reflect his interest in phonology and his
commitment to move French closer to what he
thought was the language of origins. His urge to
remain faithful to ancient usage (the so-called
censure antique) resulted in a number of ety-
mological emendations. For instance, by spelling
“dipner” for “dinner” he meant to translate and
reconnect with the Greek verb deipnein. From
1534 onward, he became increasingly systematic
in his grammar and regularized plurals and verb
forms (Huchon 1981). He fully participated in
the Renaissance search for meaning through the
relentless examination of the origin of language.
He was himself greatly stimulated by the redis-
covery of Plato’s Cratylus (4BK 37). This does
not mean that the Church Fathers’ exegetic tra-
dition was forgotten. As the Renaissance taste
for linguistic ambiguity was rekindled by Plato’s
dialogue, medieval etymologies remained alive,
through a series of syncretic practices. As a hu-
manist and a poet, Rabelais tackled some of the
issues that Isidore of Seville had discussed in his
Etymologies. He translated and parodied this et-
ymological obsession in his exuberant linguistic
creations. Some key passages of Rabelais’s po-
lyglotist farcical fiction help us understand how
foreign tongues were conceptualized in his days.
French is given privileged status as a “natural
tongue,” replacing the lost language of origins.
Yet Rabelais recognizes other vernaculars as
well, worships Latin, and writes against Cicer-
onian propaganda. He gropes for a “cultural me-
diation” between high and low cultures, and he
exhibits a fascinating mixture of rival, poly-
phonic voices (Bakhtin 1968; Cave 2001).
Rabelais’s stunning mastery of linguistic func-
tions is exemplified in the surrealistic episode of
Baisecul and Humevesne, or Kissass and
Sniffshit (P 10–13). As the litigants argue their
cases, the referential function loses its grip, but
all the other functions remain operative: emotive
(the litigants lose their tempers and shout insults
at each other); conative (they never lose sight of
the judge’s motivations); phatic (they sustain the

communication between themselves); metalin-
guistic (they point up the “logic” of their argu-
ments). Above all, through all sorts of echoes of
rhythms and sounds, they demonstrate their abil-
ity to manipulate the message. As in many other
passages, distortions of proverbs, spoonerisms,
deliberate slips of tongue, and various plays on
words contribute to the centrifugal effervescence
of language: a perfect illustration of Jakobson’s
poetic function (Rigolot 2000).
Rabelais uses a wealth of popular material for
literary purposes in order to recapture the living
forces connoted by the carnivalesque spirit and
make them the paradoxical vehicle of a new so-
cial order. The most antisocial, thoroughly
“other” pattern of life, based on death and deg-
radation, is prominently displayed in his work,
often in an offensive way. But it is there as a
powerful metaphor for social changes and for the
questioning through laughter of the most threat-
ening aspects of political and religious repres-
sion. Rabelais knew the virtue of what Latin rhet-
oricians called festivitas—a mirthful linguistic
humor that was powerfully used by Thomas
More and Erasmus, two humanists whom Ra-
belais greatly admired. In a similar spirit, Rabe-
lais creates his narrative persona, Master Alco-
frybas, a comic mask that is meant to signify a
kind of philosophical intoxication.
For Rabelais, as for Plato, dialogue is a key
necessity (Zaercher 2000). None of his positive
characters speaks alone. In the Renaissance hu-
manist culture, the paradigm of the banquet
brings mental and physical pleasure together
(Jeanneret 1991). The First Book begins with an
allusion to Plato’s Symposium, a “drinking-
together” in honor of Dionysus, the life-giving
god of nature whose worship centers around the
symbolic cycle of birth, death, and renewal (G
prol.). The reader is invited to partake in a com-
munion of minds engaged in linguistic convivi-
ality. “The convivium alone rebuilds limbs, re-
vives humors, restores spirit, delights senses,
fosters and awakens reason. It is rest from labors,
release from cares and nourishment of genius; it
is the demonstration of love and splendor, the
food of good will, the seasoning of friendship,
the leavening of grace and the solace of life” (Fi-
cino 51).
In one of the last episodes of the Fourth Book
Language 141
(4BK 55–56), the voyagers reach the confines of
the glacial sea and witness an uncanny spectacle:
“Frozen Words” become suddenly visible and
produce barbaric sounds upon thawing out. Many
interpretations have been given of this episode
(Tornitore 1985), but it may also recapitulate Ra-
belais’s deep-seated interest in language theory
throughout his four books. After staging a lin-
guistic comedy in praise of “natural language” (P
6–13), critiquing unwarranted symbolic inter-
pretations (G 9–10), and exposing the arbitrar-
iness of signs (3BK 19), Rabelais finally presents
us with a disquisition on the mimetic power of
words. This may be our poet’s most astonishing
tour de force, the verbal alchemist’s most com-
pelling transmutation. Alcofrybas, alias Rabelais,
leads us festively, through his cornucopian med-
itation on language, to the problematic Word of
the Divine Bottle (5BK).
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Terence Cave, Pré-
histoires II. Langues étrangères et troubles écono-
miques au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2001);
Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe. Nature et or-
igine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris:
Champion, 1992); Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of
Marsilio Ficino, vol. 2 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn,
1978); Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’écriture (Paris: Nizet,
1974); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammairien. De
l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, ER 16
(Geneva: Droz, 1981); Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics
and Poetics,” Selected Writings III: Poetry of Gram-
mar and Grammar of Poetry, ed. Stephen Rudy (The
Hague: Mouton, 1981); Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of
Words. Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Pierre
Mari, “Une politique humaniste de la parole.
L’interlocution rabelaisienne,” Etudes de lettres 2
(April–June 1984): 63–72; François Moreau, Les im-
ages dans l’œuvre de Rabelais, 3 vols. (Paris: SEDES,
1982); François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais
(Geneva: Droz, 1972, 1996); François Rigolot, “Cra-
tylisme et Pantagruelisme: Rabelais et le statut du
signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32; François Rigolot, “Sé-
miotique de la sentence et du proverbe,” ER 14 (1978):
277–86; “Enigme et prophétie: les langages de
l’hermétisme chez Rabelais,” Œuvres et critiques 11.1
142 Lanternois
(1986): 37–47; François Rigolot, “The Highs and Lows
of Structuralist Readings: Rabelais, Pantagruel, chap-
ters 10–13,” Distant Voices Still Heard. Contemporary
Readings of French Renaissance Literature, ed. John
O’Brien and Malcolm Quainton (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2000); Lazare Sainéan, La langue de
Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922–23; Geneva: Slatkine,
1976); Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Rabelais,”
Causeries du lundi. Œuvres, éd. Maxime Leroy, vol.
3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Charles-Augustin Sainte-
Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poésie
française et théâtre français au XVIe siècle, 2 vols.
(Paris: A. Lemerre, 1876); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et
écriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais, ER 19
(Geneva: Droz, 1987); Leo Spitzer, “Le prétendu réal-
isme de Rabelais,” Modern Philology 37 (1940): 139–
50; Jean Starobinski, “Note sur Rabelais et le lan-
gage,” Tel Quel 15 (1963): 79–81; Tonino Tornitore,
Interpretazioni novecentesche dell’episodio delle par-
olles gelées,” ER 18 (1985): 170–204; Florence Wein-
berg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1975); Véronique Zaercher, Le dia-
logue rabelaisien. Le Tiers livre exemplaire, ER 38
(Geneva: Droz, 2000).
François Rigolot
LANTERNOIS Inhabitants of an island fre-
quently referred to but ultimately not visited by
Pantagruel in the Fourth Book. The fictional
Lanternland did not originate with Rabelais. In-
spired by the aerial city of Lamptown in Lu-
cian’s True History, Rabelais first alludes to this
mythic land in Pantagruel when we learn that
the polyglot Panurge is fluent in lanternois (P
9). The Lanternland theme was further developed
in an anonymous pastiche of Rabelais’s work, Le
Disciple de Pantagruel ou la Navigation du
Compagnon . . . la bouteille of 1537. In chapters
5–8 of the Fourth Book, the Thalamège encoun-
ters during its voyage a ship of fellow French-
men. They are returning to Saintonge from a gen-
eral meeting at Lanterne, an allusion to the 1546
session of the Council of Trent. Lanterne evokes
the Third Church Lateran Council of 1179 during
which Pope Innocent III, like his successor at the
Council of Trent, was obliged to consider indi-
viduals who were choosing to interpret the Bible
for themselves without benefit of Church doc-
trine.
Linking lanterne to Lateran and hence to a
contemporary religious conflict is but one ex-
ample of Rabelais’s wordplay with the term. By
not actually depicting Lanternland Rabelais high-
lights the etymological significance of the name.
The word lanterne carried at least five different,
indeed opposing, connotations during the six-
teenth century. Lanterne might signify a type of
toy lantern that corresponds well to the Rabelai-
sian sense of play and distortion. A vain or un-
important matter also could be called a lanterne.
Lanterne has a secretive connotation by referring
to a platform from where one can see and hear
without being seen. There is, too, a slang con-
notation, meaning “copulation.” Lastly, a type of
fish with an iridescent head that purportedly
could guide sailors during storms at sea is called
une lanterne. The term appeared in several com-
mon expressions of the sixteenth century, includ-
ing radouber la lanterne, meaning to gossip. The
verb lanterner means to make foolish or silly re-
marks and, by extension, to waste one’s time or
to delay fulfilling an obligation. Most important
is the word’s reference to a source of light or to
a lamp, and hence the allusion to enlightenment
and learning. Rabelais may have been acknowl-
edging Erasmus: the Adages discuss the expres-
sion “the Lamp of Aristophanes and Cleanthes”
which refers to these men’s renowned diligence
in study and writing. The multiple connotations
that lanterne carries make the term an ideal ad-
dition to the Rabelaisian vocabulary. Such a ref-
erence in the narrative to intriguing yet ulti-
mately unseen lands emphasizes the vast quantity
of unfamiliar areas and peoples awaiting discov-
ery. On the textual level, these allusions under-
score the Fourth Book’s open-endedness and lack
of closure.
Readings: Mireille Huchon, “Archéologie du Vème
Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 19–28; Georges Matoré, Le vo-
cabulaire et la société du XVIème siècle (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1988).
Margaret Harp
LAW In the sixteenth century, legal learning
was an everyday part of the culture of educated
Frenchmen: it was not the arcane and self-
enclosed body of knowledge open only to a pro-
fessional élite which it has since become. Rabe-
lais would have been able to assume that his
readership would understand and appreciate the

legal learning (and the dependent comedy) de-
ployed in all his authentic Chronicles. Indeed,
Guillaume Budé (the greatest contemporary
legist and author of the immensely influential
Annotations on the Pandects [Annotationes in
aquattuor et viginti Pandectarum libros] of
1508) stressed that the mos Gallicus, the “French
way” of comprehending texts of Roman law,
needed sympathetic understanding of the philo-
sophical, scientific, linguistic, and moral basis of
the law, as opposed to the mos Italicus, which
for him meant a much cruder literal interpretation
of text. This cultural dependence explains why
Gargantua in his letter to his son esteems a
rounded education essential for real understand-
ing of the law (P 8). It is generally assumed that
at some time between 1510 and 1520 Rabelais
studied law, probably at Angers but possibly at
Orléans (in P 5, the giant visits the legal faculties
of several French universities, but it is from Or-
léans that he graduates with the title of Maı̂tre).
Even though he would be remembered above all
for his medical knowledge, it was the law that
appears to have marked his ways of thinking and
writing. Budé addressed him as juris studiosis-
simus; André Tiraqueau and Amaury Bou-
chard, both great legal humanists to whom Ra-
belais was to dedicate learned works, were part
of his early intellectual circle in the Franciscan
house of Puy-Saint-Martin at Fontenay-le-
Comte.
Although the law was a formative influence on
all his Chronicles, it is in Pantagruel and the
Third Book that legal learning and legal comedy
are woven most closely into the fabric of the text.
By using an ornamental frame that had been ex-
plicitly used for Guillaume le Rouille’s On Jus-
tice and Injustice (De Justicia et Injusticia
[1531]), Rabelais (through his printer Claude
Nourry) gives to Pantagruel the appearance of
a Lyonnais legal book and emphasizes the legal
character of its comedy. In a famously colorful
passage (P 5), Rabelais shows the humanist’s
concern to cast aside pedantic medieval accre-
tions and to restore the texts of Roman law to
their original purity. The comic legal trial be-
tween Baisecul and Humevesne (9, bis) is a
multifaceted episode that mocks the Italian jurid-
ical tradition of Bartolus of Sassofarrato (1314–
57) and Franciscus Accursius (1182–1260), and
Law 143
the sterility of pro et contra debate seems to ex-
plore contemporary legal issues over the auton-
omy of the university versus ecclesiastical au-
thority. But above all the concern is with the
ways in which God-given language is able to
obfuscate as much as to communicate, to com-
plicate a problem as much as to clarify it. Rhe-
torical twisting of meaning (particularly by law-
yers) will later be described in the Third Book
(44) as one of the means by which the Devil
works in this world. Rabelais shares the humanist
conviction that law as a moral force should not
be used for private advantage or to force unmer-
ited acquittals. Both Baisecul and Humevesne al-
most say something sensible, and the giant com-
ically out-argues both. Three times logical
discourse is employed to say absolutely nothing,
and the giant is credited with the wisdom of Sol-
omon.
In the Third Book, legal learning and legal
comedy are placed on a much more profound
level, centered upon Judge Bridoye, one of the
characters invited to the Platonic banquet to re-
solve Panurge’s marriage dilemma. Bridoye is
unable to come to the banquet; he has been sum-
moned to account for his judgment in a recent
case. Given that Bridoye first appears immedi-
ately after the discussion of Pauline Folly, it
would be reasonable to expect a humble and
saintly man. What readers get is an apparently
senile judge who misuses even the Brocardia
Juris (an out-of-date compilation of legal com-
monplaces, whose comic and literal misapplica-
tion would have been appreciated by most cul-
tivated men of the time; Rabelais includes it in
the Library of Saint-Victor as the Bragueta
Juris). Bridoye’s use of dice to resolve casus
perplexi (cases in which the facts were clear but
the application of the law ambiguous) was per-
mitted in Roman law, but the judge has used dice
to resolve all his cases over the past forty years.
He has failed to give an equitable judgment at
this point only because his old eyes have misread
the dice. We should be surprised not that a hum-
ble judge who has been given a prophetic gift in
a divinely appointed universe has been a success,
but only that his success should have lasted so
long. The episode demonstrates the syncretic use
of legal learning in the service of evangelical hu-
manism.
144 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques
Readings: J. M. Derrett, “Rabelais’s Legal Learning
and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963): 111–71;
Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Michael A. Screech,
“The Legal Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bri-
doye in the Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ER 5 (1964):
175–95; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:
Duckworth 1979).
John Lewis
LEFÈVRE D’ETAPLES, JACQUES (1450?–
1537) Humanist and theologian, considered in
his day to be the equal of Erasmus. In 1492, he
traveled to Italy where he met Marsilio Ficino
and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He was ac-
knowledged as the leading Aristotelian authority
of the day, and he urged his fellow scholars to
abandon the scholastic tradition in favor of the
study of original Greek texts. At the same time,
Lefèvre was exploring the mystical side of the-
ology. He increasingly devoted himself to the
study of the Bible, and in 1509, inspired by Eras-
mus, he wrote a commentary on five different
Latin versions of the Psalms. In 1512, he pub-
lished a groundbreaking commentary on Saint
Paul’s Epistles that prefigured the theology of
the Reform. Lefèvre moved to Meaux in 1521
at the invitation of his friend Guillaume Briçon-
net, the bishop. There Lefèvre led the Circle of
Meaux, a group devoted to the evangelical study
and preaching of biblical texts. In 1523, he pub-
lished a French translation of the New Testament
which drew the fire of the Sorbonne until Fran-
cis I intervened. Unfortunately, the king’s im-
prisonment in Spain gave the Sorbonne the op-
portunity to demand the dispersion of the Meaux
Circle in 1525 on grounds of heresy. Threatened
with arrest, Lefèvre fled to Strasbourg. When
Francis returned, Lefèvre was appointed keeper
of the royal library at Blois and tutor to the
king’s youngest son, which allowed Lefèvre to
continue his work on a French translation of the
Old Testament which appeared in 1530. That
same year, Lefèvre went to live at the little court
of Marguerite at Nérac where he remained until
his death.
Rabelais was strongly influenced by Lefèvre’s
(and others’) emphasis on studying biblical
sources and his rejection of medieval scholar-
ship. Pantagruel’s education includes Greek
and Hebrew in order that he might daily read and
study the Old and New Testaments in the origi-
nal. Both M. A. Screech and Donald Frame argue
convincingly for Rabelais as an evangelical.
The character of Hippothadée in the Third
Book is thought to refer to Lefèvre.
Readings: Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre d’Etaples (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, François Rabelais
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Philip
Edgcumbe Hughes, Lefèvre (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-
mans, 1984); Augustin Renaudet, Humanisme et Ren-
aissance: Dante, Pétrarque, Standonck, Erasme, Le-
fèvre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais,
Guichardin, Giordano Bruno (Geneva: Droz, 1958);
Michael A. Screech, L’évangélisme de Rabelais: as-
pects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siècle (Geneva:
Droz, 1959).
Megan Conway
LENT, KING See Quaresmeprenant
LETTERS Rabelais is the author of seventeen
letters that have survived. Other of his epistolary
texts, known to us through sixteenth-century doc-
uments, are presumably lost. Among the extant
works are two letters in Latin sent to the human-
istic luminaries Guillaume Budé and Erasmus,
a letter in French addressed to Rabelais’s friend
Antoine Hullot, a verse epistle intended for the
rhétoriqueur Jean Bouchet, four dedicatory epis-
tles in Latin at the beginning of learned editions,
a dedication in French inserted at the beginning
of the Fourth Book, three letters composed in
Rome for the attention of Rabelais’s protector
Geoffroy d’Estissac, an indirect request for
money to his patron Jean du Bellay, and four
letters inserted in his fictional works.
Traditionally, critics have shown little interest
in Rabelais’s epistolary works, using them pri-
marily to confirm or disprove interpretations
bearing on his fiction. For example, scholars
have cited the Gallic doctor’s reference to the
dissipation of Cimmerian shadows, found in his
dedication to the second volume of Manardi’s
Lettres médicales to André Tiraqueau, to sup-
port both serious and parodic readings of Gar-
gantua’s famous programmatic letter to Panta-
gruel, where the son is exhorted to take
advantage of the dawn of humanism and become
a veritable “abyss of knowledge” (“abysme de

science”). This letter on education has long been
the target of critical attention, eliciting specula-
tion as to whether it indirectly attacks the naı̈veté
of “triumphant humanism,” or whether, on the
contrary, it serves as a vibrant defense of the
movement. In any case, this missive corresponds
exactly to Erasmus’s definition of the letter of
advice on study methods and curricular matters
(epistola monitaria de ratione studiis), both in
regard to persuasive strategies (including emu-
lation of the father by the son, also advocated in
Budé’s letters to his son Dreux) and the serious
style (gravis) that is used.
Rabelais’s nonfictional letters have elicited
few analyses, with the exception of a study by
Fritz Neubert drawing our attention to Rabelais’s
use of the Ciceronian style in the most common
and general sense of “persuasive strength resort-
ing to language adornments.” The decade be-
tween 1530 and 1540, during which most of Ra-
belais’s letters were written, witnesses a dispute
pertaining to the epistolary style between the fol-
lowers of Nosopon, an Erasmian caricature who
advocates word-for-word borrowing from Cic-
ero, and the Erasmians who seek to adapt clas-
sical rhetoric to the specific needs of their times.
Situated at the very crossroads of this debate, Ra-
belais exhibits a kind of linguistic schizophrenia,
since his epistolary practices vary according to
whether he is writing in Latin or French. His neo-
Latin correspondence, strongly epideictic, fea-
tures rhetoric that is more conventional, as we
see in his letter of thanks to Erasmus and in his
missive to win Budé’s favor. These epistles are
not exempt from syntagmas or expressions con-
sidered to be typically Ciceronian by his contem-
poraries, such as the conjunction “cum” at the
beginning of the letter, the locution “etiam atque
etiam,” or the measured “tum . . . tum.” The ded-
icatory epistles are also dominated by the de-
monstrative genre, involving praise of either the
work to follow or the dedicatee. If Rabelais will-
ingly adopts the Ciceronian style in his Latin let-
ters, however, in his French correspondence he
is much more sensitive to Erasmus’s definition
of the letter as a octopus, which takes on the
color of the place in which it finds itself, and thus
is capable of an infinite variety.
Rabelais’s Italian letters, which fall under the
heading of informational letters (epistola nuncia-
Lists 145
toria) or the “letter from Rome” according to
Fritz Neubert (Romsbrief), seem to be more
strictly factual and stylistically austere, empha-
sizing the eyewitness or earwitness testimony of
the writer. It is thanks to this economy of means,
however, that we discover the rhetorical impli-
cations of these missives: they are destined to
maintain the illusion of Rabelais’s importance in
Rome in the eyes of his patron, whom he re-
peatedly plies with requests for money since, as
Richard Cooper has shown, he often retranscri-
bes in these letters distorted rumors or news
taken from gli avvisi (notices). The missive to
Antoine Hullot, moreover, constitutes a veritable
anthology example of the humoristic letter (ep-
istola jocosa), a typically French genre according
to Erasmus. The epistle shares numerous affini-
ties with Rabelais’s fiction, notably its rerouting
of liturgical Latin and its critique of Lent, as well
as its deliberate and systematic transgression of
the epistolary code—for example, use of the su-
perlative in the address “baillif du baillif des bail-
lifz,” and the disparagement of the letter-writer
in the signature: “your humble festivities organ-
izer, servant, and friend” (“[v]ostre humble ar-
chitriclin, serviteur et amy”).
Readings: Charles Béné, “Rabelais et l’art épisto-
laire dans le Pantagruel,” Recherches et travaux 26
(1984): 101–14; Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie,
ER 24 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Richard Cooper, “Ra-
belais’s Neo-Latin Writings,” Neo-Latin and the Ver-
nacular in Renaissance France, ed. Grahame Castor
and Terence Cave (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984);
Claude La Charité, La rhétorique épistolaire de Ra-
belais (Quebec: Éditions Nota bene, coll. “Littéra-
ture(s),” 2003); Fritz Neubert, “François Rabelais’
Briefe,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Lit-
eratur 71 (1961): 154–85.
Claude La Charité
LIMOUSIN SCHOOLBOY See Ecolier Lim-
ousin
LISTS One of the most gratuitous and provoc-
ative comic devices in Rabelais’s repertoire. His
pages are crowded with obstinate enumerations
of the most varied and improbable items includ-
ing food, games, books, boats, hot springs,
snakes, ancestors, and epithets. Sometimes these
lists have a satiric function, as when the pain-
146 Loup Garou
staking inventory of 217 children’s games (G 22)
mimes the tedium of Gargantua’s first, pre-
humanist education. At other times, Rabelais’s
lists seem to have no other function than to assert
their material presence on the page. Occupying
vertical blocks of text, the list explores the spatial
dimension of writing and enhances the status of
the book as object, in keeping with Rabelais’s
aesthetic of visual prose.
One context in which to situate Rabelais’s lists
is the Renaissance fascination with copia, or lex-
ical proliferation. For some readers, Rabelais’s
verbal cascades recall the vertiginous variation
exercises in Erasmus’s rhetorical manual De co-
pia. From this perspective, the pointless luxuri-
ance of lists enacts the Renaissance conscious-
ness of the hollow abundance of language.
The itemizing, anatomizing style of the list
also offers a powerful critique of narrative co-
herence. This tendency can be seen in the de-
scription of Quaresmeprenant from the Fourth
Book. Xenomanes anatomizes the monster in a
series of lists enumerating his internal and exter-
nal features as well as his “contenences” or man-
nerisms. The consequence of such enumeration
is to dislocate the syntax or coordination of the
text, leaving only isolated, interchangeable im-
ages. It is as if we were to view a mosaic from
such close range that we could only admire the
pieces and never comprehend the whole design.
Another example, also from the Fourth Book, of
the substitution of enumeration for narration is
the alphabetical ordering of snakes and other
venomous animals that interrupts the episode of
Chaneph, which in turn interrupts or immobi-
lizes the voyage in a prolonged calm at sea. Hav-
ing satisfied his hunger and having thus neutral-
ized, according to Aristotle, the danger of his
saliva for venomous animals, Eusthenes lists
ninety-eight such animals in imperfect alphabet-
ical order in two parallel columns whose dispo-
sition varies from edition to edition according to
the size of print and page. Despite Frère Jean’s
irreverent inquiry as to where Panurge’s future
wife will fit in this “hierarchy” of poisonous
creatures, the list is certainly not hierarchical. In
fact, it defies any logical arrangement. In these
opposing columns whose alignment depends on
the printer, proximity is not a sign of relation-
ship, nor does contiguity imply causality. Lists
resist the artificial coherence of syntax and plot.
Precisely for this reason, the list provides Ra-
belais with an alternative model of narration
faithful to our aleatory experience of life. The
best example of a list of stories in Rabelais’s
work can be found among the prolific pockets of
Panurge’s cloak, whose contents are inventoried
in chapter 16 of Pantagruel. Here the narrator
recounts a few of Panurge’s typical pranks or
pastimes in no particular order, introducing each
anecdote with temporally imprecise adverbial
phrases such as “one time,” “another time,” or
“one day.” There is no effort of concatenation or
consecution. Since all these anecdotes involve
special props or accessories, the narrator also de-
scribes Panurge’s cloak or “saye,” which has
more than twenty-six pockets full of tricks. The
inventory of the pockets in turn yields a series
of brief anecdotes, each drawn from a different
pocket of Panurge’s cloak. Apparently, every
pocket contains a story, but the stories do not
form any coherent sequence. Rather, like the
pockets, they are items on a list whose order is
purely arbitrary and endlessly interchangeable.
Rabelais’s lists disrupt our habits of reading
and open up new prospects of narrative sequence.
In some ways, they bring the experience of read-
ing closer to the experience of life. The list can
be a mimesis of history when it is not simply a
deposit of verbal wealth or an experiment with
visible speech.
Readings: Michel Butor, “Le livre comme objet,”
Répertoire II (Paris: Minuit, 1964); Terence Cave, The
Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);
Alfred Glauser, Rabelais créateur (Paris: Nizet, 1966).
Eric MacPhail
LOUP GAROU “Werewolf,” a cruel and ar-
rogant giant, leader of three hundred giants in
the army of King Anarche, defeated by Panta-
gruel at the climactic moment of the war against
the Dipsodes (P 26, 29). Although Loup Garou
is armed with an enchanted mace that destroys
everything it touches and Pantagruel has only a
fragile mast and the hull of his ship filled with
salt, the hero prevails, killing not only Loup
Garou but all the other giants as well who have
treacherously joined the fray. This heroico-comic
showdown is modeled on the duels of epic poetry

(Achilles vs. Hector, Aeneas vs. Turnus, etc.) and
on the confrontation between David and Goliath,
with Pantagruel in the role of the innocent David
and Loup Garou in the role of the Philistine
brute. Just before the battle, the hero utters a fa-
mous prayer in which he vows to spread the Gos-
pel and abolish all forms of popery wherever he
has dominion, if only God will grant him victory.
The vow is answered by a voice from heaven
saying: “Do this and victory will be yours” (P
29). The defeat of Loup Garou thus marks the
triumph of a chosen people and the beginning of
a new reign.
As both a giant and a “werewolf,” Loup Garou
is the perfect adversary in this archetypal battle
between good and evil. Wolves were known in
the Renaissance primarily for their rapacity and
violence toward humans, werewolves for their
anthropophagy, and giants for their cannibalism,
their cruelty, their impiety, their lawlessness and
their overweaning pride. All these qualities are
annihilated in the person of Loup Garou, to make
way for a new Golden Age of peace and broth-
erly love in Utopie.
Readings: Jean Céard, “L’histoire écoutée aux
portes de la légende: Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et
les exemples de Saint Nicolas,” Etudes seiziémistes of-
fertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plu-
sieurs de ses anciens doctorants, THR 177 (Geneva:
Droz, 1980); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1991).
Edwin M. Duval
LUCIAN (second century a.d.) The Greek
Cynic Lucian of Samosata was, together with
Varro, the most prominent imitator of Menippus
(third century b.c.), the founder of Menippean
satire. Lucian’s popularity in the Renaissance is
documented by over 330 editions of his works
between 1470 and 1600, the most famous one
being Erasmus and Thomas More’s partial
Latin edition (Paris, 1506) that had a strong in-
fluence on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and More’s
Utopia. Lucian’s presence in Rabelais is docu-
mented as early as in chapter 1 of Pantagruel,
where the narrator refers to the Cynic’s Icaro-
menippus to explain how the race of the giants
had survived the deluge.
In general, Lucian’s influence seems rather
Lucian 147
weak in the first two books, the most remarkable
episodes being Epistémon’s descent into the un-
derworld, inspired by Lucian’s Menippus (P 30)
and the narrator’s entry into his master’s mouth,
incorporating elements from the True Story (P
32). Rabelais was very familiar with Lucian,
however. While a monk at the Benedictine mon-
astery at Maillezais (c. 1524), he may even have
translated some of his works. As the earlier
chronicles’ often delightfully farcical satire, with
its typically lucianesque mixture of fantasy and
reality, becomes more refined, subtle, and eru-
dite, the influence of the Greek Cynic becomes
more palpable. In the Third and Fourth Books,
Lucian’s satirical dialogues, tall tales, and mock
encomia help Rabelais to create a satire that goes
beyond its model. If we keep in mind the fun-
damental significance of Rabelais’s prologues for
the text as a whole, the strong presence of two
Lucianic dialogues in each of the prologues of
the latter two books—A Prometheus in Words
and How to Write History (3BK), as well as Ti-
mon and Icaromenippus (4BK)—seems to illus-
trate the Cynic’s prominent position as a major
inspiration of Rabelais’s move toward a satire
marked by erudition, paradox (see Panurge’s
Praise of Debts at the beginning of the Third
Book [3–5], and the gradual opening toward a
reader who is supposed to take an active part in
the task of interpretation.
This last point shows how Rabelais ended up
thoroughly “digesting” (in the sense of Joachim
du Bellay’s famous demand in his 1549 Défense
et illustration de la langue française) and sub-
sequently outdoing his model. Whereas the mes-
sage and targets of Lucian’s satire are usually
easily identifiable, Rabelais attempts to create a
true dialogue with his readers by failing to give
clear-cut answers, which he generally achieves
by providing an incredible amount of seemingly
contradictory, or simply opaque details and in-
formation (e.g., the case of Judge Bridoye [3BK
39–43] or the descriptions of monsters in the
4BK). This leads to his trademark Menippean
paradox that leaves the reader perplexed. This
unusual approach is meant to incite the reader to
interpret more carefully and finally to question
dogmas and received truths that are normally ac-
cepted blindly. Lucian can therefore be consid-
ered a milestone in the development of Rabela-
148 Luther, Martin
isian hermeneutics and his idea of “how to write
history.”
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997);
Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Li-
vre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Christiane
Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Lucien de Samosate et le lu-
cianisme en France au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz,
1988); David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins. Humor
and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998); Claude-Albert
Mayer, Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance fran-
çaise (Paris: Champion, 1984); Marcel Tetel, “Rabe-
lais et Lucien: de deux rhétoriques,” Rabelais’s Incom-
parable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).
Bernd Renner
LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546) A German
Church reformer whose ideas were much dis-
puted during Rabelais’s time. Martin Luther’s
writings began to circulate in France shortly after
their publication. Froben, a printer in Basel, even
sent a bundle to the Sorbonne for examination
in good and due form. These works, in Latin,
caused little more than a ripple as people only
began to grasp the magnitude of the Saxon
monk’s audacious propositions; at this early date
even the decision of the papacy was still pend-
ing. The Sorbonne previewed its intentions in a
determinatio in 1521, before condemning Lu-
ther’s works, past and future, later that year. The
fifteen months that it took to render judgment
gives rise to speculation. Although it is not sur-
prising that the Sorbonne exercised its Gallican
prerogative, it does seem that Paris theologians
were waiting for the other shoe to drop in Rome.
To crown the condemnations, Parlement for-
bade the preaching of “Lutheran” doctrines in
1526.
By insisting on biblical exegesis in Greek and
Hebrew, expressing a desire to return to a purer
Church, holding the Bible over Catholic tradi-
tion, and rejecting the idea that one can force a
man’s conscience in matters of faith, Luther
seemed (at least initially) to be saying no more
or less than Erasmus. But Luther’s doctrine of
salvation—sola scriptura (by Scripture alone)
and sola fide (by faith alone)—would prove to
be a major fault line of Christian belief.
Strangely enough, not even the showdown be-
tween Luther and Erasmus on free will (1524–
25) distinguished these two Renaissance titans
in the minds of the most conservative. Closer to
Erasmus, Rabelais gives us no indication that he
adhered to Lutheran sola fide. Nonetheless, the
new ideas were globally labeled “luthériennes,”
particularly before the Council of Trent. Lu-
ther’s schismatic stance quickly became appar-
ent, and historians distinguish him from those
who remained committed to reforming the
Church from within, including Rabelais and the
evangelism movement. Not so the conservative
Sorbonne; curiously, among the mostly theolog-
ical titles they censored appeared a couple of lit-
erary works considered suspect. They were au-
thored by Marguerite de Navarre and Rabelais.
Readings: Robert Fife, The Revolt of Martin Luther
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Eva
Kushner, “Was King Picrochole Free? Rabelais be-
tween Luther and Erasmus,” CLS 14.4 (December):
306–20; Will G. Moore, La réforme allemande et la
littérature française. Recherches sur la notoriété de
Luther en France (Strasbourg: Faculté de Lettres de
Strasbourg, 1930).
Amy C. Graves
LYON Located on two navigable rivers, the
Rhône and the Saône, near the cultural centers
of northern Italy, southern Germany, and Ge-
neva, at many crossroads, Lyon was a prosperous
financial and commercial city during Rabelais’s
time, with a population of about 60,000. Lyon
was a base for Francis I’s military incursions
into Italy and thus he frequently visited that area.
Four annual fairs, which brought books, cloth,
and other manufactured and raw goods into
France as well as exporting French products, as-
sured Lyon’s ties with the rest of Europe. None-
theless, the city experienced periods of scarcity,
one of the worst occurring in 1531, two years
after the serious grain riot known as La Grande
Rebeyne. A welfare program, l’Aumône général,
was founded in 1534 to prevent these volatile
situations. Lyon arguably surpassed Paris in the
importance of its printing industry, as censor-
ship was less to be feared here. In this period,
Lyon had neither a university nor a Parlement,
but rather groups of relatively independent hu-
manist scholars and authors who were extraor-
dinarily productive. Among them were Clément

Marot, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, and
Etienne Dolet. Because of the numerous indus-
tries, silk and printing being the foremost, arti-
sans gathered to create carnivalesque organiza-
tions such as mock courts and abbeys of misrule.
Rabelais entered this lively atmosphere when he
became a doctor at the city’s Hôtel-Dieu in
1532. He chose to publish most of his works first
in Lyon. Although his colleague Symphorien
Champier’s work figures in the Library of
Saint-Victor (P 7), only passing mention is
made of the city itself (G 33, P 4, for example).
Still, it is hard to imagine Rabelais writing his
Lyon 149
works in the relatively repressive environments
of other French cities.
Readings: Françoise Bayard, Vivre à Lyon sous
l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 1997); Natalie Zemon
Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965);
Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf, eds., Intellectual Life
in Renaissance Lyon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1993), especially Richard Cooper, “Human-
ism and Politics in Lyon in 1533,” 1–32; Jean-Pierre
Gutton, Histoire de Lyon et du Lyonnais (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).
Kathleen Perry Long
 M
MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469–1527) A
Florentine bureaucrat often credited with creating
political science as an autonomous discipline.
His Il principe or The Prince, written between
1513 and 1521 in an effort to persuade Lorenzo
de’ Medici’s son Piero to take him into his serv-
ice, and his more substantial Discourses on the
First Ten Books of Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima
deca di Tito Livio), circulated widely in manu-
script, though they were not published until five
years after his death. Along with On the Art of
War (Dell’arte della guerra [Florence, 1521]),
they made his ideas known to intellectuals across
Europe, but they had scant influence on Rabelais.
A possible exception is the twenty-fourth chapter
of Book 2 of the Discorsi, in which Machiavelli
reports an Athenian query on whether a visiting
Spartan did not find Athens’ walls impressive.
Yes, the Spartan was reported to have replied, if
the city were inhabited by women. Although Ra-
belais might have conceived the walls of Paris
chapter of Pantagruel (TLF 11; P 15) on reading
these lines, Verdun-L. Saulnier identified Plu-
tarch as the likely source and pointed out that the
exchange made it into the innumerable chap-
books of useful quotations.
Gargantua and the first two chapters of the
Third Book showed more interest in politics for
its own sake than either the first or last books; but
even these texts, often labeled “anti-
Machiavellian” for their advocacy of clemency
toward prisoners of war and the vanquished owed
more to Rabelais’s relations with his patrons and
protectors, the brothers Du Bellay, than to his
meditations on the Prince or the Discourses.
Readings: Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles:
War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York:
Knopf, 2002); Francesco Guicciardini, Antimachia-
velli, ed. Gian Franco Berardi (Rome: Edition Riuniti,
1984); Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Re-
alist Thought in International Relations since Machi-
avelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);
Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Federico Chabod and
Luigi Firpo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Tori-
nese, (Turin: 1961); Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la
prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Gior-
gio Inglese (Milan: Rizollo, 1984); Verdun-Louis
Saulnier, ed. Pantagruel, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1965).
Edward Benson
MACREONS “People who live a long time”
(“Gens qui vivent longuement”), according to the
Briefve Déclaration. Their island is the setting
for chapters 25–28 of the Fourth Book. It is here
that Pantagruel and his entourage land to repair
the damages made to their vessels by the great
storm of chapters 18–22. The island is domi-
nated by a vast forest filled with temples, obel-
isques, pyramids, monuments, and sepulchres
and has become home to demons and the heroes
of legend. Their presence and that of inscriptions
and epitaphs in a variety of writing systems and
languages characterize the island of the Ma-
creons as a land of myth, legend, lessons, and
philosophy to be gleaned from antiquity. Yet the
long discussion that ensues between Pantagruel
and their guide, the “old Macrobius” (“vieil Ma-
crobe”), reveals that this land of ancient wisdom
is also the island of death. The heroes and de-
mons that live here have come here to die, and
the great monuments found in the forest are in
ruin. The characters speak at length of signs pro-
duced in nature at the deaths of great men, in-
cluding that of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543
(4BK 27). During this same discussion, Panta-
gruel relates the tale of the Egyptian pilot Tham-
ous and the death of Pan (4BK 28). As perhaps
the only unambiguously positive escale or port
of call in the Fourth Book, the island of the Ma-
creons highlights the value of classical wisdom.

With its hieroglyphs and polyglot inscriptions,
the discussion regarding the significance of the
storm, and also Pantagruel’s analysis of the tale
of Thamous, the island of the Macreons also
evokes one of the frequently discussed themes in
Rabelais’s work: the problematic relationship be-
tween writing and reading and the interpreta-
tion of signs.
Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-
trophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Douglas L. Boudreau
MACROBE A fictional character in the
Fourth Book, old Macrobe welcomes Panta-
gruel and his companions to the island of the
Macreons after the storm at sea. The Brief Dec-
laration offers the following definition: “Ma-
crobe, the long-lived man,” and the narrator of
the Rabelaisian tale presents him as the “burgo-
master” of the Macreons. In chapters 25 to 28 of
the Fourth Book, devoted to the travelers’ stay
on the island, Pantagruel asks the old man about
the causes of the storm. The old man’s expla-
nation is that natural disasters occur at the mo-
ment that demons and heroes die. In French, Ma-
crobe’s name is a homonym of Macrobius, the
fifth century a.d. Latin writer. This magistrate
(vir consularis) was the author of the Saturnalia
and a commentator on the Dream of Scipio. His
commentary, famous throughout the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, assured the transmis-
sion of fragments of Cicero’s De Republica. For
centuries, all that was known of Cicero’s treatise
was the sixth and last book with the comments
of Macrobius. Although P. M. Schedler and
W. H. Stahl have uncovered Macrobius’s influ-
ence on the Middle Ages, little work has yet been
done on the reputation Macrobius enjoyed during
the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the large number
of editions, translations, and commentaries pub-
lished in the sixteenth century testify to the broad
circulation of his works. Even in the fifteenth
century, François Villon cited Macrobius in his
Ballad of Parisian Women (Ballade des femmes
de Paris), and the author of the Saturnalia is the
writer from classic antiquity to whom Petrarch
referred most frequently. Like his contemporar-
ies, Rabelais was quite familiar with Macrobius,
Major, John 151
whose Saturnalia he mentions at the end of chap-
ter 3 of Gargantua. The name Macrobius also
appears in chapter 42b (OC 1678) of the Fifth
Book.
Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Macrobe et les
âmes héroı̈ques (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapters 25 to
28),” RAR 11.3 (1987): 211–21; Diane Desrosiers-
Bonin, “Le Songe de Scipion et le commentaire de
Macrobe à la Renaissance,” Le songe à la Renaissance
(Saint-Étienne; France: Institut d’études de la Renais-
sance et de l’Âge classique, 1990); C. R. Ligota,
“L’influence de Macrobe pendant la Renaissance,” Le
soleil à la Renaissance. Sciences et mythes (Bruxelles/
Paris: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles/Presses
Universitaires de France, 1965); Macrobius, Commen-
tary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. William H. Stahl
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); P.
Matthaeus Schedler, Die Philosophie des Macrobius
und ihr Einfluss auf die Wissenschaft des christlichen
Mittelalters (Münster: Aschendorff, 1916).
Diane Desrosiers-Bonin
MAJOR (MAIORIS, MAIR), JOHN (1467–
1550) Scholastic logician and theologian. Ma-
jor was born in Gleghornie near Haddington,
Scotland, and died at Saint Andrews. After early
studies at Haddington and Cambridge, he took
the M.A. at the University of Paris in 1494 and
the doctorate in theology, at the Parisian colleges
of Montaigu and Navarre, in 1506. He was one
of the most popular teachers of Nominalist-
terminist logic at the Collège de Montaigu in
Paris (1496–1517 and 1526–31), spending the in-
tervening and later years at Glasgow and Saint
Andrews.
Major’s numerous editions of Aristotelian
physics, ethics, and especially terminist logic
were reprinted many times. As a theologian, he
wrote commentaries on the Gospels (1518, 1529)
and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1509,
1510, 1517, 1528), and he edited the Reporta-
tiones of Johannes Duns Scotus (1518). Rabelais
and other humanists were critical of his scholas-
tic methodology and style (P 7, where Major is
said to have authored De modo faciendi boudinos
[How to Make Sausages]). But his works mani-
fest creative, independent thinking on questions
of authority, economics, and morality. Although
a staunch critic of humanist-based curriculum, in
1529 he wrote to Noël Béda and Pierre Tem-
152 Mardigras
pête that scholastic theologians had too long ig-
nored the Bible. Active in the proceedings of the
Paris Faculty of Theology, he was a conciliarist
and critic of ecclesiastical abuses but abhorred
heretical movements. Francisco de Vitoria and
later Francisco Suárez were influenced by his
theological works. Some regard him today as
having contributed to the rise of modern science.
Readings: Alexander Broadie, The Circle of John
Mair: Logic and Logicians in pre-Reformation Scot-
land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); John
Durkan and James Kirk, University of Glasgow (Glas-
gow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977); James K.
Farge, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of The-
ology, 1500–1536, n. 329 (Toronto, Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); Louis Vereecke, “Mari-
age et sexualité au déclin du moyen-âge,” Vie spiri-
tuelle, Supplément, 56.14 (1961): 199–225; F. Vos-
man, Giovanni Maior (1467–1550) et la sua morale
economica intorno al contratto di società (Rome: Pon-
tificia Universitas Lateranensis, 1985).
James K. Farge
MARDIGRAS Protector and idol of the Chit-
terlings or Andouilles in their eternal war against
Quaresmeprenant; one in a long line of mon-
sters that people the Fourth Book. In the incar-
nation of a grotesquely described winged pig, at-
tributed to the fact that all sausages are made of
pork, Mardigras flies over the battlefield at the
height of the mock battle between Frère Jean’s
culinary army and the Andouilles (4BK 42),
dropping large quantities of mustard, which heal
the wounded and resuscitate the dead sausages.
Upon seeing their monstrous God, all sausage
warriors kneel down and join their hands as if in
silent prayer. Niphleseth describes the apparition
as the “archetype” (“idea” in the Platonic sense)
of “Mardigras,” founder of the race of Chitter-
lings, the sausages’ idolatry being thus directed
toward an image of the self. In contrast to its
ambivalent offspring, the monster seems to rep-
resent a more univocal incarnation of Carnival
on a literal level.
Despite the episode’s religious ambiguities
that see Pantagruel’s party caught between the
warring Catholic and Protestant factions without
endorsing either side, Mardigras’s impact lies
mainly in the realm of the satire of the Catholic
Church and its contemptible practices, which, in
more or less subtle ways (the episode of the pap-
imanes and papefigues would serve as an ex-
ample for the latter case) runs through the text.
The apparition of Mardigras aims at two main
targets: the Eucharist, which at least since the
Affaire des Placards (October 1534) had been
a main concern of Protestant and humanist re-
formers; and the definitive schism brought about
by the Council of Trent’s official condemnation
of Protestantism.
As for the Eucharist, Niphleseth’s definition of
the resuscitating mustard as the Chitterlings’
“sangreal and heavenly balm” alludes to contem-
porary ecclesiastical rites, in which the flesh—in
true Shrovetide fashion, as Carnival was known
as “Charnage” (“flesh”) in medieval French lit-
erature—triumphs over the spirit of the cere-
mony. The elevation of “mustard” to the position
of the Savior’s “real” and “royal blood” clearly
shows the contemptible reification of sacred cer-
emonies. Rabelais had already presented a model
for the Cena (4BK 1), in which the preparations
for the fleet’s departure are completed by a cer-
emony dominated by the Holy Scriptures, remi-
niscent of the early days of pure Christianity, the
opposite of Mardigras’s cult. Such pursuit of the
restoration of “primitive Christianity” was also
the basis of Erasmus’s criticism, which, like Ra-
belais’s, goes far beyond the relatively timid ref-
ormation attempts of the Protestant liturgy. The
Greek inscription around the pig’s neck (“A Pig
Teaching Minerva”) refers to an Erasmian adage
criticizing the ignorant who attempt to teach the
wise and satirizes the decadence of Lutheran and
Calvinist reformers as well as of the Catholic
Church. The Council of Trent had focused on
these issues in its seventh (the sacraments) and
thirteenth sessions (the Eucharist), respectively,
in 1547 and 1551–52. But instead of reconciling
the factions as its name (concilium) would sug-
gest, it had contributed to the division of Chris-
tianity. Rabelais exploits this play on words at
the beginning of the episode (4BK 35) and an-
nounces its biting religious satire, directed at
Catholics and Protestants alike and capped by
Mardigras’s timely appearance.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cène, et
le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” Rabelais en son
demi-millénaire, ed. J. Céard, and J.-Cl. Margolin, ER
21 (Geneva: Droz, 1983); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s

Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais, chapter 9 (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1979).
Bernd Renner
MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE (1492–1549)
Scholars of the French Renaissance have won-
dered about the relationship between Rabelais
and Marguerite de Navarre, who was sister to the
king, Francis I, and patron of the author during
the early to mid-1540s. Rabelais had been named
“Master of the King’s Requests” in 1543, and
relations with the royal family appear to have
been good until he left Paris for Metz in 1546
(Zegura and Tetel 1993: 20).
It seems no accident that around this time Ra-
belais dedicated the Third Book to Marguerite,
inviting her to come down from her “manoir di-
vin,” in order to enjoy more stories about the
earthy Pantagruel (3BK ded.). Marguerite is
portrayed here as a patron of Rabelais and in fact
probably did help him obtain the privilege for
republication of Gargantua and Pantagruel as
well as for printing the Third Book in September
1545. She was to begin to assemble the tales for
the Heptameron the same year (1545–46), a key
time for the relationship between the two (Sal-
minen 111).
But did the relationship go beyond patronage?
Traditionally, many scholars have been surprised
by the dedication of the Third Book to Margue-
rite, since they see major differences and disa-
greements between the spiritual, feminist Mar-
guerite and the earthy, misogynist Rabelais. The
dedication has been viewed as gently ironic by
the majority of writers on the subject (Freccero
1991: 150; Lefranc, 1922) and only a few see
agreement as a motivation for it (Bauschatz
2003: 406; Tetel 1973: 106, 122).
Some similarities between the two writers in-
clude their sympathy with the Reform, and par-
ticularly with subjects discussed at the Council
of Trent, which convened in 1546, such as the
condemnation of clandestine marriage, a subject
raised by both Rabelais (3BK 48) and Marguerite
(Heptaméron 21, 40). Both reject clandestine
marriage in favor of a more traditional marriage
arranged by parents (Screech 281–86).
Although Marguerite has been viewed as a
Marot, Clément 153
spiritual thinker and Rabelais as much more ori-
ented toward the physical, the topic of marriage,
with its union of the physical and the spiritual,
is emblematic of the need for both writers to
combine the two. The friendship between Ra-
belais and Marguerite, if friendship there was,
shows them to have been more like-minded than
was previously believed. For Rabelais scholars,
this possible friendship offers a needed corrective
to the popular stereotype of Rabelais as only a
misogynistic “bon vivant.”
Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and
Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of
Clandestine Marriage,” SCJ 34.2 (2003): 395–408;
Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Nar-
rative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1991); Abel Lefranc, “Etude sur Rube-
lais,” Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Champion, 1922); Renja
Salminen, ed. Heptaméron,TFL 516 (Geneva: Droz,
1999): Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s Hep-
taméron: Themes, Language and Structure (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1973); Elizabeth Chesney
Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New
York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1993).
Cathleen M. Bauschatz
MAROT, CLÉMENT (1496?–1544) French
poet of the early Renaissance whose embattled
relationship with the Sorbonne, evangelical lean-
ings, taste for Erasmus, and satiric verve invite
comparisons with his friend and fellow humanist
Rabelais. Praised by Boileau for his “élégant
badinage” (Art poétique 1.96), the poet seems on
one hand to build upon the legacy of his father
Jean Marot, a rhétoriqueur renowned for his ex-
aggerated wordplay. On the other hand, the
sharp-edged social, political, and religious com-
mentary lurking beneath many of Marot’s poems,
particularly his Epistres and Enfers, is cut from
the same fabric as his life. Imprisoned at least
three times and forced to seek refuge abroad, de-
spite the royal protection he enjoyed early in his
career as the king’s valet de chambre, Marot al-
most certainly crossed paths with Rabelais on a
number of occasions: at the court of Renée de
France in Ferrara, for example, a haven for Re-
formers where Marot sought exile during Rabe-
lais’s southward journey to Rome with Jean du
Bellay in 1535, and at a banquet of humanists
154 Marriage
held in 1537 to celebrate Etienne Dolet’s pardon
for accidentally killing a man (Frame 1977: 14–
15). Occasional Marotic echoes also find their
way into Rabelais’s work (Screech 1979: 149 n.
23, 359), particularly his Gargantua, while two
or three poems attributed to the Gallic physician
appear in the 1533 edition of Marot’s Adoles-
cence Clementine, suggesting a “close collabo-
ration” between the two authors (Defaux 1997:
404) (see also Evangelism).
Readings: Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du
rieur au prophète (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Gérard De-
faux, Rabelais, Marot, Montaigne: l’écriture comme
presence (Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1987); Donald
Frame, Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977); Claude A. Mayer, Clément Marot
(Paris: Nizet, 1972); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais
(London: Duckworth, 1979); Pauline M. Smith, Clé-
ment Marot: Poet of the French Renaissance (London:
Athlone, 1970).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
MARRIAGE Issues related to marriage were
widely discussed and debated during the French
Renaissance for a variety of cultural reasons. In
the wake of the Reformation, theologians such
as John Calvin and Martin Luther discussed
the topic and its relation to religion. Whether
women were suitable for marriage and whether
men should marry were questions debated within
the larger intellectual context of the querelle des
femmes, a recurring debate among male and fe-
male authors over the nature and status of
women. The necessity of marriage for men was
also a standard topic for rhetorical pro/contra ar-
gumentation practice. As a result, it is difficult to
determine to what extent writers’ positions on
marriage were influenced by rhetorical conven-
tions. In this cultural context, a number of French
and Latin tracts treating marriage were pub-
lished, including Erasmus’s In Praise of Mar-
riage (1518), Vives’s The Instruction of a Chris-
tian Woman (1523), and Agrippa’s The
Commendation of Matrimony (1526). As a writer
deeply engaged in the cultural and intellectual
debates of his period, Rabelais makes marriage
an important concern of his work, but his views
are less clear and more difficult to ascertain than
those of most contemporary writers on the sub-
ject.
Marriage makes appearances in Gargantua
and Pantagruel, often evoking rather traditional
beliefs related to the institution. In Gargantua’s
famous letter to Pantagruel (P 8), “lawful mar-
riage” is mentioned within the lengthier discus-
sion of the immortality acquired by having chil-
dren. Though marriage is generally taken for
granted in discussions of procreation, in his letter
Gargantua does not insist that his son marry, nor
does he enumerate the virtues of marriage. Gar-
gantua’s ambivalent reaction to the death of his
wife who dies in childbirth (P 2) suggests the
view that marriage could be purely functional
and not based on intimacy or affection. As one
element of Rabelais’s utopia, marriage appears
briefly in the description of the Abbey of Thé-
lème (G 57). Though living in an abbey, the Thé-
lèmites can “be regularly married” if they so de-
sire, reflecting their motto “Do what you will”
and possibly a critique of the Catholic Church’s
rigidity in the area of marriage. Those who leave
the utopia of Thélème marry and live “in devo-
tion and friendship.” Marriage explicitly based
on intimacy and companionship is thus placed
outside the realm of the ideal world.
It is in the Third Book that Rabelais moves
marriage to the fore, as Panurge visits various
types of people to ask them whether he should
marry. Although his comic quest for knowledge
about marriage and women is ostensibly per-
sonal, the issue is also framed as a larger ques-
tion of whether men in general should marry.
Through the numerous and lengthy consultation
scenes (3BK 9–46), various reasons to marry are
juxtaposed with reasons not to marry in rhetori-
cal for/against fashion. Panurge’s desire for
companionship, in particular, is contrasted with
his fear of being cuckolded by a cruel wife, re-
flecting an anxiety about the masculine ability to
control female sexuality. Rabelais accepts the
widespread view that marriage exists for procre-
ation, but like Erasmus, he extends this limited
definition to include the possibility of compan-
ionship. As a result, marriage need not be con-
sidered an impediment to purity and a hindrance
to spirituality. If marriage can be for companion-
ship, women are also assumed to be more than
simple bearers of children for their husbands,
even as they are not necessarily considered equal
to men. Rabelais also implies that, as was a com-

mon assumption in marriage tracts, marriage can
moderate the excesses of male sexuality, al-
though Panurge appears to be incapable of mod-
erating his excesses.
Despite these implicit critiques of the institu-
tion of marriage the question of whether Panurge
should marry is never resolved, and no definite
judgment on marriage is ever presented. Rather,
like the texts that circulated in the Renaissance,
marriage is open to interpretation by the male
individual who has the freedom to make his own
choice about whether to marry. Panurge consults
numerous men and women (including a doctor,
lawyer, philosopher, and theologian) about his
dilemma, implying that his personal decision
about marriage should be a well-researched one
employing all the tools at his disposal. Marriage
is not inherently a good or bad way of life.
Rather, its nature should be determined on a
case-by-case basis. This individual, however,
would appear to be necessarily male in the Third
Book. Marriage is not discussed as a choice for
women, who are continually represented in re-
lation to men in the various discussions of mar-
riage. At the same time, Panurge’s comic exces-
ses, bordering on hysteria, imply a mockery of
masculine attitudes toward marriage.
Readings: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Femi-
nism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990); Todd W. Reeser,
“Moderation and Masculinity in Renaissance Marriage
Discourse and in Rabelais’s Tiers livre,” RR 90.1
(2000): 1–25; M. A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Mar-
riage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and
Comic Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1958).
Todd Reeser
MARROW OR MARROWBONE English
translations of “la sustantificque mouelle” and
“os medulaire,” respectively, terms introduced in
the prologue to Gargantua in the narrator’s dis-
cussion of allegory. Serving as metaphors of the
Rabelaisian text, the marrow and marrowbone
suggest that the chronicles have an “inside” as
well as an “outside,” and that the hidden meaning
underneath the work’s grotesque surface, akin to
the “fine drugs” contained within the frivolous-
looking Silenus box, is accessible only to those
who through “curiosity” and “frequent medita-
tion break the bone and suck out the marrow”
Medamothi 155
(G prol.). Although this metaphor serves as the
cornerstone for allegorical readings of Rabelais’s
text, it is also undermined by the narrator’s sub-
sequent caution about seeking hidden meaning
where none exists: “If you believe Homer
thought about allegories while he was writing the
Iliad and the Odyssey,” he says equivocally,
“then your interpretation is a far cry from my
own” (G prol.).
Readings: Mary Farrell, “The Alchemy of Rabe-
lais’s Marrow Bone,” MLS 13.2 (1983): 97–104; Fred
W. Marshall, “Worrying the Bone Again: The Struc-
ture and Significance of the Prologue to Gargantua,”
AJFS 24.1 (1987): 3–22; Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The
Myth of the Sustanficque Mouelle: A Lacanian Per-
spective on Rabelais’s Use of Language,” Literature
and Psychology 34.3 (1988): 1–21.
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
MEDAMOTHI (4BK 2) The island where
Pantagruel and his companions make their first
stop on the way to the Holy Bottle in the Fourth
Book. According to the glossary or Briefve Dé-
claration that accompanies Rabelais’s text, Me-
damothi means “no place” in Greek. Although
some scholars have attempted to identify the ge-
ographic location of Medamothi, others insist
that its name and nature function to discourage
any literal or realistic reading of the voyage. Ar-
riving on the island during the annual fair that
attracts the richest and most famous merchants
of Asia and Africa, the Pantagruelists purchase a
series of paradoxical art works and exotic ani-
mals which raise fascinating questions about
literary and artistic mimesis. The inventory of
Pantagruel’s art acquisitions has prompted con-
flicting interpretations, suggesting either a sud-
den penchant for “Alexandrian” symbolism on
Rabelais’s part or a preclassical taste for ideal-
izing imitation or a demonstration of the auto-
referentiality of fiction. In particular, the painting
of Platonic ideas purchased by Epistémon may
be understood to parody the Neoplatonic ambi-
tion to render the intelligible visible by means of
hieroglyphs and other occult symbols. This par-
ody of the utopian impulse to materialize the im-
material may in turn remind us of the materiality
of language, which in Rabelais often assumes
the density and opacity of a work of visual art.
In this way, language becomes visible in Rabe-
156 Medicine
lais’s text just as it does on Medamothi in the
portrait of Echo or the paintings of proverbs. For
its many paradoxes, Medamothi remains a pop-
ular destination of Rabelais criticism.
Readings: Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais
(Paris: L’Herne, 1969); Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie
et l’alexandrinisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale à
Medamothi,” ER 1 (1956): 98–111; Abel Lefranc, Les
navigations de Pantagruel. Etude sur la géographie
rabelaisienne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967); Eric
MacPhail, “The Masters of Medamothi: Rabelais and
Visual Prose,” ER 35 (1998): 175–91; Paul J. Smith,
Voyage et écriture (Geneva: Droz, 1987).
Eric MacPhail
MEDICINE Renaissance field of study and
profession intimately intertwined with religion
and philosophy, selected as an interest by Ra-
belais as early as 1520 when he learned Greek
and began to pour over ancient texts. During his
years as a novice, exposure to the sick and des-
titute likely formed in the future doctor a foun-
dation of interest in charity toward his fellow
man. Upon arrival in Fontenay, discussion and
quarrels in which he participated led him further
in the direction of medical studies, pushed on by
the humanistic promise of medicine to seek ever
more deeply a complete and encyclopedic
knowledge of the human body and soul. The
leap from novice and future priest to medical
doctor was not unrealistic for Rabelais, in light
of the nature of his studies to this point, for he
had been exposed to both ancient and modern
philosophies. According to Erasmus in his in-
terpretation of Galenic theory, the medical pro-
fession is perfectly aligned with religion. He
placed the doctor’s care for the body in line only
behind Christ’s care for the soul, naming the
practice of medicine the most important profes-
sion in Christian life. The respect for life nec-
essary in the medical field could only be mani-
fested though multiple acts of charity and indeed
through a focus on moral philosophy. Healing
the sick and caring for general health could take
place only if doctors also served as moralists.
Reforms in lifestyle, during the Renaissance as
today, were considered essential to the mainte-
nance of health. Rabelais’s humanistic studies
and life experiences thus impressed upon him the
importance of medicine as a career choice and as
a way of living out the ideals expressed in his
reading.
From 1528 until 1530, possessing a strong
command of Greek and having abandoned the
Benedictine order to become a secular priest, Ra-
belais made his way from Paris to Montpellier
where he enrolled in medical school. A mere six
weeks after the opening of classes, Rabelais was
granted his diploma in testimony to the consid-
erable preparation he had received through prior
tutoring and personal study. Study in this case
was key; medical school involved no practical
application of the healing arts but rather focused
on deciphering and commenting on texts by the
ancients. Rabelais could do this so well that he
gave a public lecture (an exit requirement for
medical students having obtained their diplomas)
on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms and a medical trea-
tise by Galen, translating directly from Greek
manuscripts. Needless to say, his presentation
made a grand impression. Still, the goal of many
years of patient, diligent work, according to all
that he had read and studied, was actually to care
for the body as a practicing physician, with the
hope that healing the body would ultimately
bring peace and contentment to the soul.
In the two years that span his graduation from
Montpellier and subsequent arrival at the Hotel-
Dieu in Lyon, Rabelais added to his growing
reputation with several scholarly publications. In
1532 he was named primary physician of the
Lyon public hospital and began the practice that
would complement and complete his years of
study and preparation. It is impossible to know
the physician’s exact impressions as he encoun-
tered the stark realities of the public hospital. He
had accepted work among the very poorest and
indeed most physically suffering patients in the
city. The hospital’s beds were full of people in
the clutches of a wide variety of ailments ranging
from dermatological problems to syphilis, from
battle wounds to full-blown contagious disease.
Although he had some access to pharmaceuticals
and could prescribe surgical procedures to be
carried out under his supervision by a barber-
surgeon, little could be done to assuage pain,
much less actually cure those under his care. The
difficulty of this work, the pitiful salary received
for it, and a recognition of the limits of the trade
most certainly played a role in Rabelais’s deci-

sion to take up the pen in a singularly caring act
of genius.
Presenting his books from the outset as med-
icine for the very public he could do little to help
tangibly as a physician, Rabelais concocts a po-
tion of words with a promise of beneficial heal-
ing for all who partake. The allegories are thor-
oughly filled with references to the doctor’s
Greek mentors and medical themes of all sorts.
Fantastical gestation and birth are followed by
unbelievable, life-restoring surgical procedures
and miraculous healing, while diet, exercise, and
musings on the role of vital organs are intermin-
gled with discussions of women and sexuality.
The books are infused with Rabelais’s vast
knowledge of anatomy, physiology, botany, and
a variety of other disciplines. Yet the healing his
allegories purport to contain resides not in the
author’s knowledge or transmission of these sci-
ences, but rather in a specific and encompassing
attention to the soul. For in Rabelais’s quest to
create laugher and thus “resjouir le malade” (give
enjoyment to the sick), in his desire to buoy the
spirit, he knows that the body will no more be
healed than by his daily visits to the sick of the
Hotel-Dieu. His target, as dictated by his human-
ist past, is the whole person—body and soul. Ra-
belais’s primary medico-philosophical “message”
of health calls for moderation, simplicity, and hu-
mility in all aspects of life. Only in this manner,
he maintains, will the human being find balance
and health. In writing, Rabelais goes beyond his
objective to exercise the most important profes-
sion in Christian life, for his charitable act and
message of health reach far beyond the sphere of
his work as physician in Lyon to all readers who
encounter the substantial, healing marrow of his
texts.
Reading: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976).
Lesa Randall
MENIPPEAN PARADOX A characteristic of
the hybrid genre of Menippean satire, founded
by Menippus (third century b.c.), whose writings
have been lost. Our knowledge is based on imi-
tations by Varro (first century b.c.) and the Greek
Cynic Lucian of Samosata (second century a.d.).
Lucian’s influence on Renaissance writers is
considerable. He claimed to have been the first
Menippean Paradox 157
to combine comedy and dialogue, which marks
the menippea’s typical mixture of genres, allow-
ing for a formal framework incorporating philo-
sophical profundity and levity in the same text
and thus achieving the Horatian utile dulci mix-
tum. This syncretism of quasi-incompatible gen-
res is mirrored on the content level by the device
of the Menippean paradox: in Rabelais’s case,
multiple, often seemingly mutually exclusive, in-
terpretative possibilities that surface especially in
the Third and Fourth Books, whose prologues
display perhaps the most explicit Lucianic influ-
ence.
Gargantua displays the timid beginnings of
this phenomenon, particularly in the prologue
with its emphasis on the paradoxical Silenus fig-
ure and its convoluted commentary on methods
of interpretation. The paradox becomes even
more prevalent in the contrasting readings of the
final Enigmatic Prophecy (alternatively a tennis
match or the persecution of Christians [G 58]).
Because of its central question of Panurge’s
marital fate, the entire Third Book may be seen
as a prime illustration of the Menippean paradox,
and so can the trickster’s sole persona, espe-
cially considering his change in attitude and
status from Pantagruel to the Third and Fourth
Books, which accentuates his initial ambivalence.
Panurge is simultaneously a “mischievous rogue”
and the “best fellow in the world” (P 16). It is
Pantagruel, who, at the end of the philosophical
banquet (3BK 35), presents a model for resolving
paradoxes through careful and informed interpre-
tation. Drawing on common sense and sound er-
udition, he shows how the philosopher Trouil-
logan’s contradictory answers to the question of
Panurge’s marriage (“both” and “neither”) mu-
tually enhance each other, thereby illustrating the
menippea’s characteristic concordia oppositorum
or union of opposites.
The Fourth Book abounds in paradoxical epi-
sodes that are henceforth most often combined
with another essential Menippean element: the
grotesque. Prime examples would be the contro-
versial farces of Dindenault (4BK 6–7) and
Basché (4BK 12–16), questioning, in our per-
spective, the right measure for punishment. The
monstrous episodes of Quaresmeprenant (4BK
29–32), the Chitterlings or Andouilles (4BK 35–
42), and Messere Gaster (4BK 57–62) stand out
158 Mercury
as their hermeneutic cornucopia is embedded in
an anatomy of the grotesque, which helps them
exceed the boundaries of conventional human
thinking and perceptions. In Gaster’s case, for
instance, the criticism is directed not only at the
disturbing image of the ambivalent ventripotent
god, “first master of arts in the world,” but
equally at the idolatry of his followers.
Because of its roots in Cynicism, the Menip-
pean paradox enables us to escape the tyranny of
dogmata and universal truths. It is therefore a
powerful device in Rabelais’s satire of the abuses
of ecclesiastical, political, or intellectual author-
ities, challenging the validity of the officially
sanctioned altior sensus and thus opening the
door to radical doubt—hence the anti-intellectual
bent of this extremely erudite approach. This fun-
damental skepticism provides an epistemological
grounding to the plurality of meanings and in-
terpretations, one of Rabelais’s major themes.
Consequently, it even inscribes the paradox in its
modus operandi and questions the authority of
human reason by appealing to the potential of
that very same reason, capable of pushing back
the limits of human knowledge if one keeps an
open mind and the willingness to think outside
the norm.
Readings: W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam.
Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1995); Dorothy G. Cole-
man, Rabelais. A Critical Study in Prose Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1971);
Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre
de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Christiane
Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Lucien de Samosate et le lu-
cianisme en France au XVIe siècle: athéisme et po-
lémique (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Bernd Renner, “Du
coq-à-l’âne à la ménippéenne: la satire comme forme
d’expression littéraire chez Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 2000); André Tournon, “Le par-
adoxe ménippéen dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Rabelais
en son demi-millénaire, ER 21 (Geneva: Droz, 1988):
309–18.
Bernd Renner
MERCURY As official messenger to Jupiter,
the smallest of the major planets, or a metallic
element easily distinguished from all others by
its constant liquid state, the name Mercury ap-
pears with regularity throughout the Rabelaisian
corpus of allegories. Although Rabelais mentions
it in passing—in enumerations of other gods—
or as a planet whose position may influence af-
fairs, he was likely best acquainted with mercury
as a chemical element used in the medico-
pharmaceutical community as a powerful ingre-
dient in lotions and ointments destined to treat
patients suffering from syphilis. When used ex-
tremely sparingly, treatment involving frictions
with mercurial ointment followed by sessions in
a steam bath produced positive results that were
well-documented. However, in the hands of em-
pirics and charlatan doctors the element was
overused, and mercury treatments acquired con-
notations of dreadful pain and, ultimately, death.
Rabelais had these associations in mind when
reserving a main role for Jupiter’s messenger in
the Couillatris story (4BK prol.). In this mock
parable, as woodsmen lose their axe blades, sym-
bols of sexual health, Mercury is charged with
presenting them the choice of their own axe
blade along with one of gold and another of sil-
ver, the latter two symbolizing sexual excess and
desire. Selecting one’s own blade thus represents
moderation in sexual activity and carries the re-
ward of living richly. Opting for one of the other
blades carries the penalty of instant death at Mer-
cury’s terrible hand. Rabelais’s dear syphilitics
would not have mistaken the meaning of this
tale, told by the doctor who wished to spare them
the fateful horrors of mercury.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles
Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin,
1988).
Lesa Randall
MODERATION (MEDIOCRITAS) Principle
of measure and balance promoted by Rabelais
in his books as essential for health and content-
ment in life. Made popular by Galen, whose
medical texts Rabelais knew well, this notion of
equilibrium encompasses moral and spiritual liv-
ing but involves the physical as well. Recogni-
tion of and respect for the body’s limitations was
deemed the surest manner to maintain health. In
his allegories, Rabelais encourages readers to
make moderation a goal in all things with the
examples of biblical and invented characters like
Zachhaeus and Couillatris (4BK Prol.). In the

case of Zachhaeus (Luke 19.1–10), who climbed
a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus passing
through town and was later visited and blessed
by him in his own home, Rabelais demonstrates
that positive consequences are likely to result for
those with moderate desires. The Couillatris
story includes the same lesson, but with strong
emphasis on health and balance with regard to
sexuality.
To make his point, Rabelais shows a wealthy,
happy Couillatris who, after praying for the re-
turn of his lost source of livelihood—in this tale
a metaphor for sexual health—was rewarded for
his simplicity and honesty with land, animals,
and gold. Rabelais then juxtaposes a contented
Couillatris with the hoards of greedy men who,
interested only in pleasure and rapid wealth, are
given the extreme punishment of death for their
desires of excess. Sure to appeal to the sensibil-
ities of philosophers, doctors, and patients alike,
Rabelais’s lessons on this rule of measure may
be considered a form of medicine insofar as they
provide both preventive instruction and amuse-
ment. In an age of epidemic disease, syphilis and
warfare, Rabelais seeks to prolong and improve
lives by popularizing mediocritas as the best and
most accessible method he knows.
Readings: Vivian M. Gruber, “Rabelais: The Di-
dactics of Moderation,” EC 32 (1963): 80–86; James
S. Hans, The Golden Mean (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1994); Todd W. Reeser,
“Framing Masculinity: The Discourse of Moderation
in Renaissance Culture,” Ph.D. diss., University of
Michigan, 1997; Todd W. Reeser, “Moderation and
Masculinity in Renaissance Marriage Discourse and in
Rabelais’s Tiers livre,” RR 90.1 (1999): 1–25.
Lesa Randall
MONEY The presence of representations of
monetary exchange and financial terms through-
out Rabelais’s novels is indicative of the budding
of capitalism and the concomitant changes in the
mentality of sixteenth-century France. Historian
Eugene Rice identified the period from 1460 to
1560 as the period when Western Europe became
capitalist (Lavatori 1996: 1). According to
Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, after
the sixteenth century, the entire organization of
signs, or episteme, changed from one where signs
were seen as based on a natural order or resem-
Money 159
blance to one where money and other signs were
considered arbitrary couplings of signifier and
referent functioning by pure convention (168–
76).
The inflationary nature of the French economy
is well known. Pierre Vilar stipulates that prices
rose fourfold in France during the period from
1520 to 1600 (1976: 178). The circulation of for-
eign coins added further confusion to monetary
exchanges. Vilar mentions that eighty types of
coin were in circulation even in seventeenth-
century France (21). Furthermore, while the
pound (livre) had at one time been an actual
pound of silver, the actual coin had ceased to be
produced, although, throughout the sixteenth
century, people continued to estimate prices in
terms of livres and sous which had become imag-
inary counting monies (Vilar: 21). Adding to the
difficulty in calculating fair prices, governments
maintained the right to devalue or inflate the
value of the currency in circulation to suit their
needs (Vilar: 21). The means of payment could
also include premonetary barterlike exchange,
with the actual payment at times involving such
diverse means as horses, weapons, sacks of grain,
or cloth estimated to hold the value of the agreed
upon price (Bloch 1954: 48). Finally, the emer-
gence of credit in the form of bills of exchange,
which permitted payment through the balancing
of debts and credits without the exchange of ac-
tual gold, proliferated in the sixteenth century,
particularly at the fairs such as the one in Lyon
(Vilar: 73).
Rabelais seems to delight in exploring the
multiplicity of means of payment and competing
value systems with their possibilities for decep-
tion and the creation of paradoxical relations. Ze-
gura and Tetel identify this practice as Rabelais’s
propensity for “trafficking in two-sided tokens”
(1993: 23). They see Panurge in his immoral
economic practices as a reference to the schemers
of Gallic folklore and the ethics of personal ec-
onomic profit which were reputed to dominate
Italian business practices at the time (24–25).
Panurge characteristically manipulates economic
transactions for personal gain, often producing an
effect contrary to the acknowledged purpose of
the exchange and crediting the windfall to his
own sense of justice. Whenever he met a mon-
eychanger, he managed to secret away five or six
160 Money
coins without the changer’s knowledge (P 16).
Rabelais seems to be redressing the abuses of
moneychangers and lenders who, through their
knowledge of the rates of exchange, could sur-
reptitiously extract money from their clients.
In a similarly carnivalesque reversal, Panurge
outwits the sellers of pardons, returning from
kissing relics with his pockets full of money.
Panurge explains that, while only giving a “de-
nier” or small change coin, he did so with such
reverence as to make it seem a much more im-
portant denomination, actually taking twelve or
more deniers as “change.” Although Pantagruel
denounces the practice as heresy, Panurge de-
fends himself using the pardoners’ own promise
of a hundredfold return against them (P 17). Re-
versing similar inequalities from the real world
which Rabelais inhabited, the underworld Epis-
témon visits has popes selling paper and meat
pies to earn a meager living and usurers collect-
ing rusty pins and scrap metal just to earn a mis-
erable penny (P 30).
As with many enumerations in Rabelais, ex-
pressions of monetary value are often indications
of the self-referential nature of Rabelais’s texts.
For the construction of the Abbey of Thélème
which Gargantua offers in feudal fashion to
Frère Jean in recognition of his service, Gar-
gantua pays out 2,700,831 Agnus Dei gold coins
in cash (G 53). This very exact figure recalls its
fictive nature and casts doubt on the credibility
of such a playful narrator. According to Zegura
and Tetel, one of Rabelais’s goals from the very
first prologue to the end of the book is to culti-
vate a skeptical and informed reader through his
constant references to conflicting and indetermi-
nate expressions of value (54).
In the prologue to the Third Book, the nar-
rator initially fears that his readers will be of-
fended by the arbitrary nature of his production.
Later he realizes that the readership he has cul-
tivated will accept his eccentric production in
good faith as he has seen them take good-will,
or credit as payment (prologue). In this way Ra-
belais links his production of fiction with its pro-
ductive play of pure signs to the developing of
credit in the economic domain. In chapters 2–5,
Rabelais presents Panurge’s famous Praise of
Debts through which the trickster defends his
own cause by casting credit as a form of distrib-
utive justice (3BK 2), promoting natural or even
celestial harmony (3BK 4). However, in his por-
trayal of the perfect peace, Panurge presents a
world where gold, silver, coins, jewelry, and
merchandise are exchanged (3BK 4). His portrait
of the ideal economy presents the transitional na-
ture of the sixteenth-century economy in which
gold and silver circulated as coins and in the
more personalized form of rings. In this incom-
pletely monetary economy, more financially ad-
vanced processes such as debt or credit are pres-
ent and praised (Lavatori 1996: 73–74). There is
no absolutely privileged way of determining
value or meaning in the systems evoked in the
sixteenth-century episteme as it appears in the
Third Book.
In contrast, Rabelais at times proposes a func-
tional model of society in which exchanges are
based not on the materiality of the signs pro-
duced but on relationships of good-will between
participants in exchange. In an effort to convince
Panurge to take advice from a fool, Pantagruel
recounts how Seigny Joan once settled a notori-
ously difficult dispute by determining that a por-
ter had paid for the smoke he had used from a
meat-roaster’s fire to season his bread by simply
taking out a silver coin and ringing it (3BK 37).
Rabelais is pointing to a realm of symbolization
where signs have a value in themselves beyond
their intrinsic value, serving to facilitate
exchange, much as fiduciary or paper money
does in more developed economies (Vilar 1976:
20).
In the Fourth Book, Rabelais investigates the
fetishization of economic signs and their produc-
tivity in exchange. Dindenault, an insulting and
dishonest sheep merchant whom Panurge and the
crew of the Thalamège meet on a ship they come
across on their voyage to consult the oracle of
the Divine Bottle, goes so far as to call his live-
stock “moutons à la grande laine,” playing on a
pun that refers to both high-quality wool sheep
and gold coins stamped with an image of the
Lamb of God (4BK 6). Christophe Deberre
points out that Dindenault literally sees his sheep
only for their exchange value as money (Lavatori
1996: 127–128). Similarly, Panurge conflates his
economic transaction with the merchant and a
secondary emotional payoff. When Dindenault
and Panurge finally agree upon a price, it is only

for Panurge to throw the sheep purchased over-
board, knowing that the nature of sheep is such
that the others will follow, eventually taking Din-
denault with them as he attempts to save his live-
stock. Panurge thus exploits the productivity of
signs and claims to have profited from the
exchange, getting “fifty thousand francs’ worth”
of amusement at the drowning of his adversary
(4BK 8).
The prologue to the Fourth Book tells the
story of Couillatris, a poor woodcutter who one
day loses his ax and loudly implores Jupiter to
have it returned or provide its fair market equiv-
alent in “deniers” (4BK prol.). Jupiter eventually
rewards Couillatris for his modest request with
gifts of a gold and a silver ax in addition to his
own. In turn, he exchanges the gold and silver
axes at the Chinon market for quantities of gold
and silver coins with which he purchases farms
and livestock. Because of this productive chain
of exchanges, Couillatris is the envy of his fellow
countrymen who intentionally “lose” their axes
and are punished (4BK prol.).
On the Island of Procuration, in chapter 12,
Panurge and the crew meet the Chiquanous who
earn their living by being beaten. The practice
illustrates to what extent the monetary economy
and the desire for money had denatured relation-
ships to the point where they are objectified and
become “purely instrumental relations,” as Jür-
gen Habermas describes the effects of money on
human interaction (qtd. in Lavatori 1996:
p. 140). For the Chiquanous, all social relation-
ships are defined and justified by monetary
exchange; the Chiquanous refuse to provide food
or drink to the crew but instead offer to be at
their service “en payant,” for a price (4BK 12).
For Panurge, money is an easy substitute for ac-
tion and piety. When a storm threatens to sink
their ship, Panurge, gripped with fear, refuses to
assist his comrades but sees money as his sal-
vation. He proposes that the crew help him to
pay for a pilgrim in order to ensure that a miracle
will save them (4BK 20). The Isle of Papimania
is inhabited by a race of Papimaniacs who mis-
direct their adoration to the portrait of a Pope
(4BK 50) and whose bishop recommends the for-
saking of all occupations for the studying of pa-
pal decrees called Decretals (4BK 51). When
these Decretals are used as parchment for striking
Monsters 161
coins, all the money from them is misshapen and
full of holes (4BK 52), reinforcing the theme of
distorted values. However, the Papimaniacs are
not without funds. Their bishop appears from
their temple with basins full of Papimaniac
money (4BK 51). In rather ethnocentric fashion,
even these distant islands reflect the economic
situation of their contemporary France with its
developing capitalism. The bishop Homenaz ex-
plains that the Decretals benefit the Papimaniacs
with their “aurifluous energy,” which causes hun-
dreds of thousands of “ducatz” to flow from
France to Rome each year (4BK 53). Clearly, the
exotic world of the Fourth Book with its mys-
terious economic practices is not so removed
from the realities of France, which was supplying
the Roman court to its own detriment.
Reflecting the historical reality of his society,
Rabelais’s characters experiment with the varied
means of symbolization and of exchange char-
acteristic of the transitional nature of the Ren-
aissance episteme. In this sense, Rabelais’s de-
pictions of monetary exchange can be seen as an
exploration of the basis of representation at a
pretheoretical level.
Readings: Marc Bloch, Esquisse d’une histoire mo-
nétaire de l’Europe (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin,
1954); Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La généalogie du
pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,”
Littérature 50 (1983): 15–35; Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things, ed. Ronald D. Laing (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973); Gerard Lavatori, Language and
Money in Rabelais (New York: Peter Lang, 1996);
Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920,
trans. Judith White (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1976); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura and Marcel
Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).
Gerard Lavatori
MONSTERS The Rabelaisian books contain a
noteworthy collection of monsters and monstrous
bodies. The Renaissance world, from which Ra-
belais originated, produced a literature filled with
monsters and monstrosities, incorporating beliefs
evolved largely from Greek and Roman sources,
including Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Livy, He-
rodotus, and Saint Augustine. Throughout the
Renaissance, the term monster, whether derived
from monstrare, “to show,” or from monere, “to
warn,” evoked a diverse range of meanings: an-
162 Monsters
imal or human, physical or moral malformations,
or large size. Aristotle, in the Generation of An-
imals, categorized monsters as something created
praeter naturam, not in the ordinary course of
nature, while still adhering to natural laws.
Rabelais’s treatment of monsters was informed
by Greco-Roman sources, by Renaissance ge-
ographies and histories, and by early sixteenth-
century thought in general. From Pliny’s Natural
History, Rabelais espoused the belief that mon-
strous races lived in distant, exotic regions of the
earth. Herodotus’s detail of the dog-headed cy-
nocephali of Libya appears in the compilation of
obscure terms in Rabelais’s Fourth Book, Bri-
efve Déclaration: “canibales: a monstrous peo-
ple in Africa who have faces like dogs and who
bark instead of laughing.”
In the prologue to the Third Book, perhaps to
intensify his readers’ xenophobic curiosity, Ra-
belais characterized monsters as members of ex-
otic races. Drawing from Ptolemy’s tale of the
“motley-colored man” presented to the Egyptians
as a curiosity, but whom they instead abominated
as a monster, Rabelais contrived to create a cul-
tural appetite for oddities within his own narra-
tive. Undeniably, Rabelais exploits and commo-
difies monsters and monstrosities to fulfill
various demonstrative functions, either to gain a
readership, to reveal certain abuses, to expose re-
ligious or political zealots, or to criticize or op-
pose his detractors.
The monsters and monstrous bodies scattered
throughout the works of Rabelais appear in sev-
eral traditional forms, the most common being
the folkloric giants Grandgousier, Gargantua,
and Pantagruel. While constituting a race apart
from ordinary humanity, these gigantic protago-
nists, reputed for their heroic, moral, and intel-
lectual stature, were neither physically monstrous
nor evil. A second type of giant embedded in the
works of Rabelais is the traditional classical or
allegorical giant embodying evil, stupidity, and
unnaturalness. The Pantagruel contains images
of three hundred stupid, warring giants, and their
gigantic captain Loup Garou who fought, “jaws
wide open” and with an “enchanted mace” (P
29). Although lupine features are largely absent
from Rabelais’s description, loup garou (were-
wolf) suggests a monstrous deformation of the
appearance known as lycomorphosis.
Pygmies occupy the other extreme of
grotesque-size deformation in Pantagruel where
they appear in opposition to giants’ bodily pro-
portions, while sharing similar extraordinary
births. Borrowing from the most famous account
of pygmies found in the Iliad (3.5), Rabelais in-
corporates their constant battle with the cranes
into his account of Pantagruel engendering “fifty-
three thousand little men, deformed dwarfs,” and
“as many stooped little women,” from the gas he
passed (P 27).
One of the more distinctive geographical and
zoological episodes in Rabelais’s Fourth Book
(4BK 33–34) chronicles Pantagruel’s killing of a
monstrous whale (physetere), the epitome of all
sea monsters. The “sea monster” (Greek, “the
blower,” or “spouter”) was a sperm whale as de-
scribed in Pliny’s Natural History and depicted
on Olaus Magnus’s illustrated Carta Marina
(1539) near the Faroe Islands, which Rabelais
clearly associated with Isle Farouche in his
Fourth Book. Panurge equated this violent and
powerful monster with “Diable Sathanas, Lévi-
athan,” the embodiment of Old Testament evil.
Two episodes surrounding the physetere (4BK
33–34) are thematically linked: Quaresmepren-
ant (4BK 29–32), an ambiguous, Lent-like fig-
ure, and the Andouilles (4BK 35–42), who stand
for Mardi Gras. Taken together, the three epi-
sodes form part of Rabelais’s anticlerical (Popish
Rome or Calvinist Geneva) satire. On another
level, the monstrous Quaresmeprenant, whose bi-
zarre anatomy is described by Xenomanes, be-
comes Rabelais’s illustration of excessive self-
indulgence, since he violated the rules of
mediocritas or moderation.
Readers of Rabelais encounter many more
monsters in the Fourth Book, including “Amo-
dunt and Discord,” the grotesque and ugly chil-
dren of Antiphysis, “monsters deformed and mis-
shapen in despite of Nature” (4BK 32);
Bringuenarilles, a traditional giant, “swallower
of windmills,” who yearly exploited the Island of
Ruach, consuming indiscriminately (4BK 44).
Both Bringuenarilles and Quaresmeprenant have
been identified as Emperor Charles V, insofar as
he embodied religious bigotry.
Because Rabelais’s treatment of monsters is
used to frame denunciations and scorn directed
at his enemies, or fanatics who attacked his writ-

ings, scholars have noted that, by focusing on
what monsters do, or on what they are like,
vengeful representations such as those seen in the
Third and Fourth Books become complex and
effective means for Rabelais to express derision
of real persons, or to engage readers.
Readings: Michel Jeanneret, “Rabelais, les mon-
stres et l’interprétation des signes (Quart Livre 18–
42),” Writing the Renaissance, ed. Raymond La Char-
ité (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Samuel
Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Paul
J. Smith, Voyage et écriture, étude sur le Quart livre
de Rabelais (Geneva, 1987).
Karen Sorsby
MORE, SIR THOMAS (?1477–1535) One of
England’s greatest humanists and a celebrated
figure of the European Renaissance. More
hosted visits by Erasmus and Hans Holbein to
his house in Chelsea, met Guillaume Budé at
the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and with
John Colet was the foremost supporter of Greek
learning in the early English Renaissance. He en-
tered Parliament in 1504, became master of re-
quests and a privy councillor in 1517, and suc-
ceeded Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in
1529. His fame as the “Man for All Seasons”
rests upon his opposition to the divorce of Henry
VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Although More
was willing to agree to the Act of Succession, he
was implacably opposed to any oath that would
have impugned the authority of the Pope or ren-
der valid the king’s divorce. In 1534 he was
committed to the Tower of London and found
guilty of high treason; he was beheaded in 1535.
For his principled Catholic stand he was beatified
in 1886 and canonized in 1935. His most famous
works include: a translation (with Erasmus) of
Lucian’s Dialogues (1506); Utopia (1516), a de-
scription of an imaginary island where reason
and justice reign; and the Dialogue touchynge
Luther and Tyndale (1528), a controversial work
that illustrates the obsessive nature of More’s
pursuit of heresy. Rabelais may have had More
in mind when he created the character of the
English cleric Thaumaste, a humble seeker after
truth (P 13). Similarly, Amaurotum, the capital
city of More’s Utopia, is echoed in Rabelais’s
Pantagruel, where Utopie is the kingdom ruled
Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s 163
by Pantagruel’s royal father and “la ville des
Amaurotes” is the largest city in the land; Bad-
ebec, wife of Gargantua, who dies giving birth
to Pantagruel, is the daughter of the king of the
Amaurotes (P 2), and in the same book, Panta-
gruel and his army defend the Amaurotes against
invasion by the Dipsodes (15, 21). Such Morean
echoes emphasize the fact that Rabelais was de-
liberately associating his book with learned cir-
cles linked to Erasmus himself. In the same per-
spective, the use of dice by Judge Bridoye (3BK
43) to resolve casus perplexi is also discussed in
the same evangelical context in More’s Dialogue
(Works, II, 106).
Readings: Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Raymond W.
Chambers, Thomas More (1935; Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan, 1958); Richard Marius, Thomas
More: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984; André
Prévost, Thomas More (1477–1535) et la crise de la
pensée européenne (Paris: Marne, 1969); St. Thomas
More: Selected Letters, edited by Elizabeth Rogers
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); The
Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas
More, 15 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1963–1997).
John Lewis
MOUTH, WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL’S In
chapter 32 of Pantagruel, the narrator Alcof-
rybas Nasier climbs into the protagonist’s giant
mouth to escape a rainstorm. In contrast to the
series of fantastic locales that provide the setting
of the Fourth Book, the world in Pantagruel’s
mouth is remarkable in its everyday banality. At
a time when accounts of a New World inhabited
by unfamiliar peoples were readily available in
Europe, Rabelais’s narrator describes an encoun-
ter with a French-speaking peasant who is busy
planting cabbages in a Franco-Italianate country-
side. After an early run-in with some brigands—
hardly exotic creatures in sixteenth-century Eu-
rope—Alcofrybas settles down for a good, long
sleep. He emerges six months later.
By focusing attention on both the giant’s body
and the narrator’s bodily functions, the episode
enlists conventions typical of the medieval comic
realism of the Gargantuan Chronicles (Chro-
niques gargantuines), popular tales from which
Rabelais explicitly borrowed. In addition, the
164 Music
fairly detailed mapping of Pantagruel’s interior
incorporates Rabelais’s humanist medical train-
ing by drawing on Galen’s Hippocratic topog-
raphy of the human body. The specifically med-
ical resonance of the episode has echoes in the
following chapter, in which a constipated Pan-
tagruel is cured when he swallows a series of
copper pills containing little men who set about
clearing out his intestines with picks and shovels.
The scene inside Pantagruel’s mouth has been
characterized on the thematic level as both quin-
tessentially realistic and typically grotesque.
Most critics consider the primary source of the
episode to be Lucian’s satirical True History, in
which an eyewitness narrator enters the mouth of
a whale. There are also several precedents for
Alcofrybas’s buccal journey in the Chroniques
gargantuines. Though not particularly innovative
on the thematic level, Rabelais’s rendering of the
mouth voyage nonetheless departs significantly
from both its classical and medieval models by
creating profound discontinuities between the
world in Pantagruel’s mouth and the worlds out-
side of it.
In medieval versions of the voyage into the
mouth of the giant Gargantua, the giant is al-
ways asleep. The narrators of the various Chro-
niques thus never abdicate their position as
chronicler, since the giant has no adventures to
speak of while they explore his innards. Simi-
larly, entry into the mouth of the whale does not
take Lucian’s eyewitness away from some other
narrative sphere, since the narrative sphere of the
True History is nothing other than the sum total
of all the things its narrator happens to see. The
buccal voyage in Pantagruel, by contrast, creates
a complex, multilayered narrative in which the
narrator actually loses sight of his protagonist.
Upon exiting his master’s mouth, Alcofrybas
learns that he has entirely missed the culmination
of the mock-epic war between good and evil that
he had been chronicling when the storm broke
out.
Just as news of Pantagruel’s final victory fails
to reach the world in Pantagruel’s mouth, so does
any but the most superficial news of the mouth
world fail to reach Pantagruel and his compan-
ions. The apparent mutual exclusivity of these
two worlds effectively disrupts the totalizing pre-
tensions of epic narration while simultaneously
exploiting the possibilities for creating multiple
worlds within a single text.
Readings: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard
Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1953); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,
trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod vidimus testamur:
Testimony, Narrative Agency and the World in Pan-
tagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24 (September 1999): 261–83;
François Rigolot, Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva:
Droz, 1972).
Andrea Frisch
MUSIC That Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor
who replaces the stultifying sophists, should en-
courage the young Gargantua to “sing musically
in four and five parts” and to play the harp, lute,
flute, and clavier (G 23) is no surprise. Classified
as a part of the quadrivium or as one of the
“mathematical sciences” (G 23), music in the six-
teenth century was considered an essential part
of the cursus studiorum, anticipating today’s ad-
vocacy of early training in music. As one might
expect from a Renaissance man, moreover, Ra-
belais himself exhibits a strong knowledge of and
interest in music, both religious and secular,
throughout the Pantagrueline chronicles. On a
pedagogical level, the musical curriculum he out-
lines for Gargantua is characteristically ambi-
tious: the young giant learns to play half a dozen
instruments simultaneously—strings (harp, lute,
violin), winds (flute, trombone), and keyboard
(spinet)—and enjoys (“se esbaudiss[oit]”) his in-
struction, which immediately follows his geom-
etry and astronomy lessons. In addition to
playing a key role in the formation of his intel-
lect, Gargantua’s music lessons also contribute to
his social development: after dinner he and oth-
ers in the household “sing musically” and “play
harmonious instruments,” a skill that also figures
in the training of Thelemites (G 57).
Far from limiting his comments on music to
pedagogical theory, Rabelais also demonstrates a
familiarity with musical vocabulary, instruments,
and composers that is far from routine. His abil-
ity to list fifty-eight musicians of his own era,
ranging from Josquin des Prés to Jannequin, in
the Fourth Book prologue is a feat that few

modern-day novelists, physicians, naturalists, or
clergymen could replicate. On the basis of this
list and the musical similes, metaphors, and im-
ages that permeate his text from start to finish,
Nan Cooke Carpenter surmises that Rabelais al-
most certainly received musical training (1954:
79). Her classic monograph, which features an
exhaustive catalogue and analysis of musical
terms in the chronicles, reveals the wide range of
contexts in which Rabelais expresses himself
musically. Quite predictably, given the Platonic
overtones of his text, the author evokes the “har-
mony of the spheres” repeatedly as a referent to
the Ideal. But allusions to wind and percussion
instruments, analogous in their shapes and
sounds to various bodily functions and anatom-
ical parts, also figure in comic, erotic, and scat-
ological contexts.
That Rabelais views his own literary vocation
musically is in fact suggested in the prologue to
the Third Book, where he likens his creative ef-
forts to those of Amphion, who assembled the
walls of Thebes by playing his lyre. By analogy,
the Gallic physician writes “to the sound of [his]
musette.” In fact, parallels between Rabelais’s
polysemic text and musical polyphony are strik-
ing; and his literary conflation of learned and
Music 165
popular culture is mirrored by sixteenth-century
musical practices, which feature both the inser-
tion of popular materials into courtly or
“learned” compositions and the composition of
popular songs by “serious” or liturgical compos-
ers like Jannequin.
Finally, Rabelais’s text itself has served as the
inspiration for a number of musical composi-
tions, including the comic opera Pantagruel
(1910) by Alfred Jarry and Eugène Demolder;
Panurge, haute farce en trois actes (1913) by
Jules Massenet; and the “Marche de Cocagne”
(1920) by Erik Satie.
Readings: Nan Cooke Carpenter, Rabelais and Mu-
sic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1954); Guy Demerson, Rabelais. Une vie, une oeuvre,
une époque (Paris: Balland, 1986); Frank Dobbins,
Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992); Clément Jannequin Ensemble, Les cris
de Paris (Burbank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1996);
Newberry Consort, Villon to Rabelais, Sixteenth Cen-
tury Music of the Streets, Theatres, and Courts (Bur-
bank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1999); Mary Springfels,
“Paris from Villon to Rabelais: Music of the Streets,
Theater, and Courts” (http://www.newberry.org/nl/
consort/villonprogram.html).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
 N
NARRATOR, FIGURE OF The first two
books of the Pantagruel series were published
under François Rabelais’s anagrammatic pseu-
donym, Alcofrybas Nasier. In the “author’s pro-
logue” to Pantagruel, Alcofrybas assumes both
the narrative stance characteristic of a traditional
medieval storyteller and that of a firsthand eye-
witness, reminiscent of the narrator of Lucian’s
True History. Like the narrators of the medieval
Chronicques gargantuines, Alcofrybas fre-
quently addresses his readers directly in this
book, as if to replicate an oral storytelling situ-
ation in a circumscribed community. Unlike the
narrators of medieval popular romance, however,
Alcofrybas sometimes appears as a character in-
side the story he is telling. In chapter 17, we find
him walking down the streets of Paris with Pan-
tagruel’s companion, the trickster Panurge;
more famously, in chapter 32, he enters the giant
Pantagruel’s mouth. Alcofrybas’s position as a
character in Pantagruel ultimately serves to dis-
tance him from his audience. When he addresses
this volume’s readers, he usually adopts a defen-
sive posture, spewing invective at those who
don’t believe his tale.
In Gargantua, by contrast, Rabelais’s narra-
tor softens his antagonistic stance toward the au-
dience and appears to position himself firmly in
their world. Having abandoned the Lucianic pre-
tense to eyewitnessing—perhaps in part because
Gargantua’s story precedes Pantagruel’s chron-
ologically—Alcofrybas cultivates a sympathetic
relationship with a community of readers that he
continues to address as if they were physically
present to him. The Third Book, for its part, is
made up largely of the direct discourse of Pan-
tagruel, Panurge, and their companions. As in
Gargantua, the narrator never appears to be
among them. Although the Third Book was pub-
lished under Rabelais’s name, the author’s pro-
logue to this volume maintains and develops the
relationship with the audience that Alcofrybas es-
tablishes in the first two books.
The narrative voice of Rabelais’s novel
changes again with the Fourth Book. The pro-
logue, signed by Rabelais, opens with greetings
to a community of readers with which the nar-
rator is by now on very familiar terms, thus re-
inforcing the atmosphere of medieval storytell-
ing. Further on, however, the narrator subtly
reestablishes his links to the world of Pantagruel
when, in chapter 5, he begins recounting the
story in the first-person plural (“we . . . discov-
ered a merchant vessel”), thus implying that he
was among those sailing with the giant in search
of the Holy Bottle or Dive Bouteille. From this
point on, the narrator is a relatively quiet but con-
sistent presence inside the story, periodically
coming to the fore as in chapter 38, where he
adopts the defensive posture of the eyewitness
we saw in Pantagruel: “Believe if you wish to
. . . I know exactly what I saw” (4BK 38). The
Fifth Book is dominated by the eyewitness nar-
rator. In this volume, however, he has many
more conversations with Pantagruel and com-
pany than he does with the reader.
In both the Fourth Book and the Fifth Book,
little effort is made to link the narrator of the
prologue, who chats amiably with his fellow
pantagruelistes, with that of the novel proper,
who constantly sets himself apart from his read-
ers by making repeated, explicit claims to have
“seen” any number of fabulous objects and
events. This kind of mixed rhetoric owes as
much or more to contemporaneous firsthand
travel accounts, such as those of Jacques Car-
tier, than it does to Lucian. Like Rabelais’s
traveler-narrator, eyewitness historians in the pe-
riod openly struggled to articulate a perspective
at once individual and unique (“I saw” [“je

veidz”]), yet also sanctioned by a community of
fellow travelers (“we discovered” [“nous des-
couvrismes”]) and by a community of readers (a
community usually constructed by means of a
separate prologue, as in Rabelais’s novel).
Ultimately, over the course of the five books
of Pantagruel, we witness some of the central
aspects of the evolution of the figure of the sto-
ryteller in an age when the local communities
that grounded narration in the medieval period
were being redefined by the increasing centrali-
zation of the French state and by the technology
of print.
Readings: Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eye-
witness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004); Floyd Gray, “Rabelais’s First Readers,”
Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, ed. Raymond C. La
Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Ruth
Mulhauser, “Rabelais and the Fictional World of Al-
cofribas Nasier,” RR 64 (1973): 175–83.
Andrea Frisch
NATURE There are 121 instances of the word
“nature” in Rabelais’s corpus, not counting cog-
nates. As in all Renaissance discourse, it is a
highly polysemantic word in Rabelais’s writing,
but some of the principal meanings are the fol-
lowing:
1. Nature as a creating or generative force (natura na-
turans), often written with a capital N, the antith-
esis of destructive Antiphysie (4BK 32). In most
instances, the word has theological connotations,
which are typical of the Renaissance notion of na-
ture as a whole. Natura naturans was understood
as a power or entity subject to God which per-
formed the work of His creation in the sublunary
world. The creation itself, natura naturata, was a
physical manifestation of divine order, the under-
standing of which would lead to a greater under-
standing of a manifest God. Nature’s primary pur-
pose is to ensure that the cycle of death and
reproduction continues, both human and nonhu-
man, as Panurge indicates before his encomium to
the codpiece (3BK 8). It is thus part of the sublu-
nary corruptible world and “makes nothing immor-
tal” (G 20). After the second coming, Gargantua
suggests, there will be no more nature, since “all
generation and corruption” will cease (P 8).
2. The normative order created by that force (natura
naturata), in expressions such as “which colors are
in nature” (G 9), “a vacuum, which is not tolerated
Nature 167
in nature” (4BK 62), or (a sense very closely bound
to the first) “strange births against the order of na-
ture” (G 6). “Order of nature” here can mean the
order of what has been created, nature, or the order
intended by the creating force, Nature. (It should
be noted that the word nature is rarely, if ever, con-
comitant with “landscape” in the modern sense, ex-
cept inasmuch as place and surroundings are part
of Nature’s creation). The notion of natural order
is particularly freighted in the Renaissance, with
much debate about the cause of disturbances to that
order: were monsters, cataclysms, strange events,
considered to be part of nature’s order or against
it? Were they miracles, portents, punishments, or
simply another, albeit rare, facet of nature’s struc-
ture? Rabelais is of course very engaged with such
debates and shows many sides of the question. His
race of giants, for example, is alternately against
nature and normalized.
3. Qualities inherent to an object or a being, as the
Parisians who are “silly by nature” (P 7). This is
the meaning shared with “naturellement” (twenty-
seven instances), and recalls the shared etymology
between “nature,” “naı̂tre,” (to be born) and “na-
tion,” as does Panurge’s warning that “human na-
ture”—that is, the race or nation of humans—
would die without the testes (3BK 8). The notion
of human nature is complex, in fact. Picrochole’s
nature pushes him to excess, whereas the Thélém-
ites are virtuous “by nature” (G 57).
The relationship between the human and the
nonhuman worlds, the microcosm and the mac-
rocosm, generated varying theories in the six-
teenth century, many of which Rabelais explores.
Particularly controversial is the question of por-
tents, or whether events in the macrocosm can
be interpreted as predictions of microcosmic (hu-
man) events. Rabelais wrote several Almanachs
and Prognostications. In the Almanachs of 1533
and 1535, he denounces divination, stating that
we should rather put our faith in God and leave
his secrets untouched. The third book as a whole
is an exploration of just such questions, and Her
Trippa (3BK 25) is a reductio ad absurdum of
the figure of the diviner who claims to read hu-
man futures in every possible natural sign. The
other side of the argument, however, is that God
willingly reveals his intentions to the alert ob-
server through his natural creation, an opinion
that is also found in Rabelais. Pantagruel’s
speech on the death of heroes (4BK 27) states
firmly that macrocosmic nature is thrown into
168 Nature
confusion “against all natural order” by a tragic
event in the human microcosmos. On the other
hand the sea tempest is given no such definitive
gloss (4BK 22), and Rabelais in the Pantagrue-
line prognostication states that it is folly to think
that there are certain stars reserved for kings
alone (PP 5).
The notion of an occult link between nonhu-
man and human nature is often schematized as a
prescientific mentality. It has been posited that
medieval and Renaissance notions of nature were
incompatible with the systematic attempt to un-
derstand and describe its workings and that the
concept of nature as an object of study emerged
only with the so-called Scientific Revolution.
This is not the case. Even medieval “books of
secrets,” however occult they may seem to us,
promised power to the reader who studied and
understood nature’s mysteries. A significant dif-
ference between modern and premodern inquiry
into nature lies, rather, in the place of theological
teleology, with the premodern initiate a privi-
leged witness into divine design, whereas mod-
ern study of nature coexists uncomfortably at
best with religion. In Rabelais, nature does ap-
pear as an object of study—for example, in Gar-
gantua’s letter to his son (P 8) in which he out-
lines an ideal educational program that includes
zealous study of the “facts of nature.” Some crit-
ics have read this as evidence that Rabelais’s
conception of nature witnesses a paradigm shift
toward human mastery and possession of nature,
and away from Nature as a force greater than
human. Rabelaisian nature, then, is situated at a
pivotal point between the old and the new.
Messere Gaster is read as an example of an
emerging spirit of control over nature and its
forces: his inventions escalate in the degree of
manipulation from agriculture and building to
genetic manipulation and, finally, gunpowder, by
which Nature herself admits defeat (4BK 61). It
would also be possible to read the chapters on
the Pantagruelion with the same slant. The en-
comium makes increasingly extravagant claims
for the plant, ending up with a vision of nations
that have overcome the physical limits of dis-
tance, and an intriguing but little-studied moment
of paranoia on behalf of the Olympic gods, who
see what Pantagruel has achieved and worry that
his sons will penetrate the secrets of nature, visit
the source of rains, ascend to the moon, and fi-
nally topple the gods from their place.
The notion of an emerging rationalist spirit of
control over nature is useful, provided one keeps
in mind certain caveats that prevent us from
calquing modern polemic too directly onto the
semantic field of nature in Rabelais. For exam-
ple, the study of nature is not yet designated by
the word “science” (“natural history” is the term
used): “science” in sixteenth-century French con-
serves the sense it has in the Latin scientia, that
is, knowledge in general. When Gargantua fa-
mously says that “science without conscience is
the ruin of the soul” (P 8), he is not referring to
unscrupulous manipulation of nature’s resources
and secrets, but to any knowledge that is not ac-
companied by ethical considerations. Gaster’s
mastery of Nature is followed by a chapter that
presents two very different types of human in-
teraction with nature: the first is a rational “sci-
entific” inquiry into the properties of magnets
that allows Gaster to create a cannonball deflec-
tor; the second is a long list of miracles (mostly
from Pliny the Elder) attested to certain plants,
which support the claim that Gaster has used an
occult property in a plant to repel bullets (4BK
62). The contrast is marked for modern readers,
but the conceptual gap seems to be ours, not Ra-
belais’s. Rational and mystical-occult views of
nature frequently coexist in his text. For exam-
ple, the magnetic door in the Fifth Book is ex-
plained with a similar bewildering blend of dis-
courses (GP 5BK 37; OB 5BK 36). What does
seem new in Rabelais’s text compared with ear-
lier notions of the study of nature is the idea that
all can be known. Gargantua encourages his son
to learn literally everything there is to be known
about the “facts of nature” (P 8), although the
vision of encyclopedic knowledge is made iron-
ical by Thaumaste, who assures his spectators
that Panurge opened up to him “an encyclopedic
abyss.”
Rabelais writes in a period when notions of
nature and the natural were every bit as multi-
faceted as they are today, but with different par-
ameters. The semantics of the word “nature,” as
well as ways in which the nonhuman world was
perceived and studied, were shifting in the six-
teenth century, and Rabelais engages consciously
with such shifts. Over the whole hovers the fig-

ure of Alcofrybas, the narrator controlling his
text as the alchemist effects changes in nature,
making nature signify differently as he sees fit.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges
(Geneva: Droz, 1996); Guy Demerson, Rabelais
(Paris: Fayard, 1991); Stanley Eskin, Physis and An-
tiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and
Calcagnini (Berkeley: University of California, 1962);
Michel Jeanneret, “Rabelais, les monstres et
l’interprétation des signes (Quart Livre 18–42),” Writ-
ing the Renaissance. Essays on Sixteenth-Century
French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray, ed. Ray-
mond C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum,
1992); Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart Li-
vre,” ER 1 (1956): 188–202; Francis Métivier, ed., Ac-
tes des conférences du cycle “Rabelais et la nature,”
ER 31 (1996); André Pellicier, Natura, étude séman-
tique et historique du mot latin (Paris: PUF, 1966);
Harold S. Wilson, “Some Meanings of ‘Nature’ in
Renaissance Literary Theory,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 2.4 (1941): 430–48.
Louisa Mackenzie
NAZDECABRE (3BK 19–20) A deaf mute
whom Panurge consults, after his visit to the
Sibyl of Panzoust and prior to his encounter with
the dying poet Raminagrobis, regarding his di-
lemma as to whether or not to marry. Following
a by now familiar pattern, an exposition of this
particular method of divination (3BK 19) paves
the way for the actual consultation of the mute
and the interpretation of his signs (3BK 20).
Since methods of divination relying on the inter-
pretation of words have so far failed, Pantagruel
proposes an alternative method, relying on ges-
ture rather than on articulated language, which
he claims is deceptive and equivocal. Humanists
attached a great importance to gestures, deeming
them to be a natural language in certain respects
superior to the conventional language of words.
Pantagruel chooses a mute deaf by birth in order
to ensure that he be naı̈f—that is to say, effec-
tively uncontaminated by verbal language. Naz-
decabre’s name, which signifies “nose-of-goat,”
has bawdy connotations and suggests connivance
with the devil. The comic gestural exchange be-
tween Panurge and Nazdecabre recalls a similar
debate by signs in the Thaumaste episode (P
18). But here the gestures, in turn erotic and vi-
olent, are more down to earth and transparent in
Neoplatonism 169
their meaning, exciting Panurge’s anger. These
chapters of the Third Book touch on some of the
central preoccupations of the whole work: lan-
guage and its origin, conventional and natural
signs, Cratylist and Aristotelian linguistic theo-
ries, communication by signs and gestures, and
problems of interpretation.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges.
L’insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva: Librairie
Droz, 1977); Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe.
Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–
1580) (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1992).
Agnieszka Steczowicz
NEOPLATONISM Idealistic philosophy stem-
ming from the writings of Plato, especially the
Timaeus, and rearticulated by such Neoplatonists
as Plotinus, Proclus, and the Florentine humanist
Marsilio Ficino. Linked in some of its Renais-
sance manifestations to astrology, divination,
demonology, and hermeticism, Neoplatonism in-
forms Rabelais’s work virtually from start to fin-
ish. The seminal prologue to Gargantua, with its
allegory of the marrowbone and Sileni, evokes
the Neoplatonist tradition from the outset by pos-
iting a gap between appearance and reality that
the discerning reader must bridge, like Plato’s
philosophical dog, by seeking the text’s hidden
meaning or substantificque mouelle (marrow).
Rabelais continues in a Platonizing vein with his
choice of the Androgyne for Gargantua’s im-
age; his fascination with symbols and hiero-
glyphs, his own convivium that rivals the Pla-
tonic symposium; the Frozen Words episode
and allegorical painting of Plato’s Ideas in the
Fourth Book, and the transcendent quest for the
Divine Bottle that drives the Fifth Book. Al-
though some would argue that these Neoplatonic
echoes are largely playful, intended to bamboo-
zle the reader with the lure of hidden meanings
that do not in fact exist, G. Mallary Masters sug-
gests, on the contrary, that the author is inviting
us to “play with him” (17) and extract the mar-
row from Rabelais’s hermetic text.
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-
tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1969); Jean Seznec,
The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Bollingen Series 38
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
170 Niphleseth
NIPHLESETH Queen of the female “An-
douille Sausage Warriors,” who mistake Panta-
gruel for their archenemy Quaresmeprenant
and attack the giant and his party in an episode
of carnivalesque mock warfare (4BK 35–52).
The Briefve Déclaration defines her name as the
Hebrew term for the “male member,” thus ex-
plicitly blurring gender distinctions that have al-
ready been called into question by the phallic
shape of her subjects. She symbolizes the cor-
nucopia of frequently mutually exclusive allu-
sions and interpretations common to most epi-
sodes of the Fourth Book, in this particular case
through inherent sexual, religious, and political
ambiguities. The most obvious of these ambi-
guities is the phonetic proximity of “eels” (an-
guilles), a Lenten food, and chitterlings (an-
douilles), a carnival food, an ambivalence
extended into the biblical realm (Genesis) by an-
guis, “snake.”
Politically, the designation of infanta for Ni-
phleseth’s daughter, the only procreative Chitter-
ling and thus truly a counterpart to sterile Quar-
esmeprenant, identifies the Chitterlings’ island as
a Spanish dependency. Pantagruel’s gift of a
knife to Niphleseth is reminiscent of Cartier’s
dealing with native peoples, the topos of the ex-
ploration of the New World being further rein-
forced by the tribute of 78,000 Chitterlings an-
nually to be sent to Gargantua, who, in turn,
offers them to the “King of Paris.”
The Amazon queen’s request for pardon after
the defeat in the culinary battle is granted in an-
other display of Pantagruel’s magnanimity in vic-
tory. The demand is based on the statement that
chitterlings contain more excrement than malice.
While certainly reflecting imperfect contempo-
rary techniques of preparing tripe sausage, this
observation adds to the negative connotations
that Mikhail Bakhtin’s “lower bodily stratum,”
as well as the genre of the farce (via its culinary
origin, the “stuffing” of meats), acquires in the
Fourth Book—hence Pantagruel’s absence from
the mock battle, and, more importantly, the re-
fusal to consume the sausages (as in the corre-
sponding episode from Le Disciple de Panta-
gruel, Rabelais’s model): Friar Jean’s army of
cooks prefers to eliminate them, and dead Chit-
terlings in Paris are simply buried.
Readings: Barbara Bowen, “L’episode des An-
douilles (Rabelais, Quart livre, chapitres XXXV–
XLII): esquisse d’une méthode de lecture,” Cahiers de
Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–21; Barbara Bowen, “Lenten
Eels and Carnival Sausages,” EC 21 (1981): 12–25;
Françoise Charpentier, “La guerre des Andouilles,
Pantagruel, IV, 35–42,” Études seiziémistes offerts à
V. L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Samuel Kinser,
Rabelais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1990).
Bernd Renner
NOURRY, CLAUDE (fl. 1493–1533) Printer/
Bookseller in Lyon, produced the first edition of
Pantagruel, probably in 1532.
Reading: Henri Louis Baudrier, Bibliographie ly-
onnaise: recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, re-
lieurs et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVIe siècle,
ed. J. Baudrier, vol. 12 (Lyon: Librairie Ancienne
d’Auguste Brun, 1895–1921).
Stephen Rawles
NOVEL The question of the genre of Rabe-
lais’s fictional narratives remains undecided.
They have evident parallels with epic and chi-
valric romance as well as with dramatic forms
like the dialogue. The hybrid nature of Rabelais’s
work inspires hybrid generic designations such
as the term “epic New Testament” applied to
Pantagruel. To refer to Rabelais’s works simply
as novels may seem both limiting and anachro-
nistic.
Although Rabelais’s fictions predate the offi-
cial inception of the modern novel, they occupy
a prominent place in what the Soviet critic Mik-
hail Bakhtin called the prehistory of the novel.
For Bakhtin, the novel began as an encyclopedia
of genres, incorporating dialogues, poems, let-
ters, speeches, descriptions, and short stories, all
forms present in Rabelais’s heterogeneous fic-
tions, with their vast range of genres and styles.
Above all, in Rabelais, language, from a me-
dium of representation, becomes an object of rep-
resentation. It becomes the hero of the story,
which is the fundamental attribute of novelistic
discourse for Bakhtin.
Rabelais exemplifies Bakhtin’s thesis that the
novel supersedes the epic by portraying the char-
acters and events of fiction on the same temporal
level as the audience, thus abolishing epic dis-
tance. The most obvious method he employs to

bridge epic distance is simply to refer directly to
events in contemporary French history, such as
the Battle of Marignano fought in 1515 (P 1), the
persecution of university professors suspected of
Lutheranism (P 5), or the collapse of one of the
towers of the Cathedral of Bourges in 1506 (P
29). One consequence of the proximity Rabelais
achieves between the fictional world of his he-
roes and the real world of his audience is the
deflation or humanization of heroism. To main-
tain their dignity, epic heroes recede into an in-
accessible, legendary past, while the parodic gen-
res that give rise to the novel contemporize
characters and events so as to bring them low.
The classic instance of this debasement of the
heroic is Epistémon’s visit to the underworld (P
30), which brings together the inaccessible he-
roes of classical epic with more recent and more
comic figures in a corrosive, contemporizing
contact. In this way, Rabelais assures the break-
through of a truly modern temporality necessary
for development of the novel.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagi-
nation, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Guy De-
merson, “Paradigmes épiques chez Rabelais,” Rabelais
en son demi-millénaire (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Barry
Lydgate, “Printing, Narrative, and the Genesis of the
Rabelaisian Novel,” RR 71 (1980): 345–73.
Eric MacPhail
NURSEMAIDS Maids entrusted with the
suckling or care of a child. In Rabelais, refer-
ences to nursemaids point to their mammalian
function, even though right after Gargantua’s
and Pantagruel’s births, no nursemaids, other
than cows, could provide the necessary amount
Nursemaids 171
of milk to feed the gigantic toddlers. Their mam-
malian function put aside, they fulfill especially
in Gargantua the more significant role of a sex-
ual surrogate. The narrator refers to the nurse-
maids as objects of the boy’s libidinal desire. In
chapter 11 Gargantua is said to be always grop-
ing and/or fondling his nursemaids. In so doing,
the narrator adds, he was already exercising his
“codpiece.” While sprucing up Gargantua’s cod-
piece with bouquets, ribbons, flowers, and silken
tufts, as it seemed to be their duty, the nurse-
maids caused the boy to have an erection. As
each one claims it for herself, one greedily men-
aces to cut it off. An earlier narratorial reference
(G 8) to how Jupiter cut off the horn of his goat,
Amaltheia, transformed it into a horn of plenty,
and offered it to his own nursemaids, Adrasteia
and Ida, in gratitude for their taking care of him
might explain why Gargantua’s nursemaids
wanted to cut it off. They regarded the boy’s
“horniness” as a reward for their daily adorning
of his codpiece. The nursemaids later realize that
if they cut it off Gargantua would be infertile and
they would prohibit the ultimate gift: to see their
master have offspring, which after all was the
reason they were entrusted with his care.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1979); Hope Glidden,
“Childhood and the Vernacular in Rabelais’s Gargan-
tua,” Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for
Donald Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry
Nash (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1991); Levilson
C. Reis, “The Role of Nursemaids in the Awakening
of Gargantua’s Sexuality,” French Studies Bulletin 65
(Winter 1997): 11–13.
Levilson C. Reis
 O
ORLANDO FURIOSO (ROLAND FURIEUX)
Mock-epic romance written by Ferrarese author
Lodovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and mentioned
by Rabelais in his prologue to Pantagruel
(1532). Heralded by Alcofrybas as a volume
with “occult properties,” this sequel to Boiardo’s
Orlando innamorato chronicles the adventures
and misadventures of knights errant from the me-
dieval Charlemagne cycle, including Roland,
who is unlucky in love and goes mad. Although
there is little evidence that Rabelais borrowed di-
rectly from his Italian predecessor, both authors
combine Renaissance ebullience and an enco-
mium of humanistic achievements with a critical
look at the era’s underside. Similarities between
the two works include their fantasy, burlesque
elements, satire, paradox, and ambiguity; their
episodic narratives and shifty narrators; their
mockery and interrogation of heroic models;
common references to the voyages of discovery
and a journey to the moon; Lucianic elements;
and a shared focus on fools, folly, and madness.
Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoy-
age of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading
of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Chapel Hill: Duke
University Press, 1982); Marcel Tetel, Rabelais et
l’Italie (Florence: Olschki, 1969).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
 P
PAN, DEATH OF The tale of the death of Pan
is recounted by Pantagruel while on the Island
of the Macreons in chapter 28 of the Fourth
Book. This tale of Thamous, the Egyptian pilot
commanded by a mysterious voice to report the
death of “the Great Pan,” comes on the heels of
an extended discussion of natural upheavals oc-
curring at the deaths of great men. The tale is
taken from Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum and
was understood as referring to the shepherd-god
Pan, son of Mercury and Penelope. Although it
strikes the modern reader as a legend, Plutarch
presents it as an historical event and Rabelais
likely understood it as such. Through Pantagruel
he interprets the event as referring to the death
of Christ based on a reading of the name Pan
(“all” in Greek), their common vocation as shep-
herds, and because Thamous was commanded to
deliver the message during the reign of Tiberius
Caesar, who governed Rome at the time of the
Crucifixion. The chapter closes with the giant
moved to tears in contemplation of the tale he
has just told. Crowning a discussion regarding
the immortality of souls, Pantagruel’s interpre-
tation of the death of Pan demonstrates Renais-
sance Christianization of ancient thought. The
death of Pan has also been read as allegory in-
spired by the religious troubles in sixteenth-
century France. Christ is again killed as his
Body, in the form of the Church, is misused and
dismembered. This chapter is followed immedi-
ately by the visit to Tapinois, the island governed
by Quaresmeprenant, and has been interpreted
as marking a thematic move into Lenten sorrow
that will not be lifted until Pantagruel responds
to Frère Jean’s request to “haulser le temps”
(find a pastime) at the end of the Fourth Book.
Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-
trophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Douglas L. Boudreau
PANTAGRUEL Pantagruel, the son of Gar-
gantua and Badebec, is the principal character
in the four books definitely written by François
Rabelais. In Pantagruel, Rabelais does stress the
gigantic dimensions of this character, but the
Third Book and the Fourth Book do not refer
to his enormous physical size. His mother Bad-
ebec died while giving birth to him, and for that
reason Pantagruel was raised in an almost exclu-
sively male environment. In the sixth chapter of
Pantagruel, the title character reveals his con-
tempt for those who use language in order to
impress others and not to seek truth. He threatens
the Ecolier Limousin who speaks French in such
a Latinized style that his comments are almost
incomprehensible.
Pretentiousness and a lack of sincerity are both
unacceptable to Pantagruel, and this is why he
has so many conflicts with Panurge, a sophist
who does not seek truth. Although he is at first
impressed by Panurge’s ability to speak in both
real and imaginary languages, Pantagruel soon
begins to notice Panurge’s bad faith and lack of
respect for others. In chapter 17 of Pantagruel,
Panurge mocks religion by selling indulgences,
and in the next two chapters Panurge uses ob-
scene gestures in his debate with the learned but
foolish Englishman Thaumaste. When a Pari-
sian noblewoman (see Haughty Parisian
Woman) refuses to grant Panurge a date, he has
dogs urinate on her dress as she leaves the Ca-
thedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Rabelais makes
it clear to his readers that Pantagruel does not
possess Panurge’s repulsive qualities, and this
enhances his readers’ opinion of Pantagruel. Like
174 Pantagruel
his father Gargantua, Pantagruel hates war, but
he does not shy away from his military obliga-
tions. Like his father, he also obtains victory
through strategy and skill, and he does every-
thing possible to limit the number of deaths in
battle. He treats the defeated Dipsodes with mag-
nanimity.
In both his Third Book and Fourth Book, Ra-
belais frequently contrasts Panurge and Panta-
gruel. In the third and fourth chapters of the
Third Book, Panurge develops clearly specious
and self-serving arguments in a vain effort to jus-
tify his huge debts. Pantagruel sees through this
argument, and he states that Panurge should stop
being a parasite and should instead work hard to
earn respect from others. Panurge, who has
shown contempt for women, now asks Panta-
gruel whether or not he should marry. Panta-
gruel, who has not forgotten how Panurge gro-
tesquely treated the Parisian noblewoman,
recognizes the insincerity of Panurge’s question.
Pantagruel realizes that a successful marriage de-
pends on the fidelity and sacrifices of two equals.
Unlike Pantagruel, Panurge does not respect
women. The wisest advice that Panurge receives
is from the theologian Hippothadée in the thir-
tieth chapter of the Third Book. This theologian
tells Panurge that if he turns away from alcohol-
ism, lives virtuously, obeys the Ten Command-
ments, and does not treat his wife as a sexual ob-
ject, he will have a good marriage, if it pleases
God. He encourages Panurge to trust in God’s ab-
solute love. The selfish and misogynistic Panurge
refuses to listen to such exemplary advice.
The Fourth Book also stresses profound dif-
ferences between Panurge and Pantagruel. Chap-
ters 18 to 22 in the Fourth Book describe how
different characters react when their lives are
threatened during a storm at sea. Pantagruel first
prays fervently to God and then does whatever
the pilot asks him to do in order to save all the
crew and passengers from drowning. There is no
conflict between what Pantagruel does and what
he says. Such is not the case for Panurge, who
feigns a religious conversion but will not do any-
thing to help others during this storm. Panurge’s
hypocrisy is made obvious once the storm ends.
His newly found religious faith disappears, and
both Pantagruel and Frère Jean criticize him for
his clearly bad faith.
Rabelais very effectively defines Pantagruel in
opposition to Panurge. Panurge is such a total
egotist, misogynist, coward, and hypocrite that
Rabelais leads his readers to attribute to Panta-
gruel the positive character traits that are the op-
posite of those negative qualities shown by Pan-
urge in both his deeds and words.
Readings: Richard Crescenzo, “Les controverses in-
terprétatives de Pantagruel et Panurge dans le Tiers
Livre: Etude des stratégies rhétoriques et argumenta-
tion,” Rabelais: A propos du Tiers livre, ed. James
Dauphiné and Paul Mironneau (Biarritz: J & D Edi-
tions, 1995); Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A
Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1973); Carla Freccero, Father
Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Ra-
belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the
Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1969); Michael A. Screech, Ra-
belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Edmund J. Campion
PANTAGRUEL The earliest of Rabelais’s four
entirely authentic “books of Pantagruel,” first
published in 1532 in Lyon as a small chapbook
under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofrybas
Nasier. Rabelais presents his work as a sequel to
the Grandes chroniques de Gargantua, an anon-
ymous and quite mediocre Arthurian mock epic
published earlier the same year in Lyon, from
which he borrowed certain salient characteris-
tics—gothic format, popular style, low-brow hu-
mor, and the basic idea of a giant hero and his
comic exploits—but combined these with great
humanistic learning and a serious political, ethi-
cal, and religious purpose. The result is one of
the greatest satirical works of the Renaissance.
Its unique blend of high and low cultures, of ex-
quisite learning and vulgar humor, of lofty ideals,
vinous buffoonery, and mean pranks, was enor-
mously successful in its time but has proven sin-
gularly disconcerting to post-Reformation, post-
classical readers weaned on ideas of generic
purity, stylistic and behavioral decorum, and the
incompatibility of Christian revelation and what
Mikhail Bakhtin euphemistically called “the
lower bodily stratum.” The prominence given to
wine and high jinks has led many to view the
work as an inconsequential bacchanalian bur-

lesque, a view compatible with the fact that
“Penthagruel” was already known to Rabelais’s
readers not as a good giant but as a tiny devil
who, during the comic interludes or “diableries”
of mystery plays, drove poor sinners to drink by
pouring salt down their throats. But much of this
burlesque is a pretext for mordant satires against
various incarnations of pretension, power, and
orthodoxy, and a vehicle for progressive political
and religious ideas inspired by Christian human-
ists like Erasmus and Thomas More.
Set in a Utopie inspired by More’s recent sat-
ire, Pantagruel narrates in episodic but linear
fashion the birth, education, and heroic exploits
of its eponymous hero, son of the giant Gargan-
tua and direct descendant of such notorious
ogres as Nimrod and Goliath, Polyphemus and
Cacus, Fierabras and Fracassus. According to a
quasi-messianic prophecy uttered at the moment
of his birth, Pantagruel is predestined to become
the “dominateur des alterez,” or “Lord of the
Thirsty.” The hero eventually fulfills this proph-
ecy by liberating his native Utopie from the in-
vading Dipsodes (“Thirsty”) and establishing a
utopian colony in Dipsodie (“Land of the
Thirsty”). Most of the book narrates Pantagruel’s
preparation for his eventual victory over the Dip-
sodes. Sent by his father to France to pursue his
formal studies, Pantagruel finds only lazy stu-
dents and incompetent, benighted professors in
each of the ten universities of late medieval
France. In Paris, an encounter with a schoolboy
from one of the poorest provinces in France (the
Ecolier Limousin) spouting comically preten-
tious, “highfalutin” speech, suggests that the only
effect of a Parisian education is to turn ignorant
boys into conceited snobs (P 6). To complete this
entirely negative picture of French learning, an
inventory of the library of the Abbey of Saint-
Victor suggests the futility of all scholastic and
pietistic learning of the Middle Ages (P 7).
In contrast, Gargantua’s famous letter to his
son spells out a humanistic program of studies
that includes classical languages (Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic), classical rhetoric,
history, civil law informed by moral philosophy,
medicine informed by natural history, and the-
ology consisting of direct readings from the Bi-
ble in the original languages (P 8). Thanks to this
progressive education, Pantagruel becomes a vir-
Pantagruel 175
tual incarnation of the new learning (an “abysme
de science”) who confounds the greatest experts
in all medieval disciplines by defending 9,764
theses against all comers and resolves an intrac-
table, incomprehensible legal dispute between
two lords, Baisecul and Humevesne, by putting
into practice the principles of humanistic law (P
10–14). Together, the chapters devoted to Pan-
tagruel’s education constitute a scathing satire of
medieval learning and an idealized picture of hu-
manism as the solution to all the world’s ills.
The most vivid and memorable character of
Pantagruel is the hero’s epic companion Pan-
urge, an unsavory and somewhat diabolical
trickster in the mold of Till Eulenspiegel. In
contrast to Pantagruel, a royal heir become a
learned sage, Panurge is a rootless drifter who
has gained practical knowledge of the world
through experience and hard knocks and who has
learned to survive by his wits, similar in this way
to wandering Odysseus and the picaresque heroes
of the following century. By his own account he
has just returned to France from an ill-fated cru-
sade against the Turks, where he was nearly
roasted alive (P 14). In his travels he has learned
to speak all modern languages, as he demon-
strates in his first meeting with Pantagruel (P 9).
Fed and clothed by Pantagruel, he soon proves
to be a bizarrely lovable knave—“mischievous,
a cheat, a drinker, a hobo, a scrounger if he was
in Paris, and for the rest, the best son in the
world” (P 16)—who delights in humiliating civil
and ecclesiastical authorities and his social su-
periors (16), who makes ends meet by stealing
from alms boxes (17), and who takes ignoble re-
venge on a Haughty Parisian Lady who has
rebuffed his obscene advances (21–22).
Pantagruel and Panurge would seem to form
an unlikely pair, and indeed a curious rivalry be-
tween the two is played out throughout the book.
Nearly every action by Pantagruel is mimicked
in degraded form by Panurge. But the relation-
ship between them soon proves to be mutually
beneficial. When a wily representative of the old
guard, the “great cleric” Thaumaste, arrives
from England to confound Pantagruel with un-
answerable questions about illegitimate arcane
sciences like alchemy and astrology, the even
wilier Panurge substitutes himself for the de-
fenseless hero and easily defeats and humiliates
176 Pantagruelion
the cleric in a hilarious debate by signs (18–20).
The partnership of Pantagruel and Panurge thus
combines strength and humanistic learning with
expedience and popular cunning.
No sooner has this partnership been estab-
lished than news arrives that Gargantua has been
transported to the land of the fairies and that Uto-
pie has been invaded by Anarche, the lawless
king of the Dipsodes (23). Pantagruel quickly
leaves Paris to defend his homeland, taking with
him Panurge and three other companions whose
names suggest qualities useful in war: Carpalim
(quick), Eusthenes (strong), and Epistémon
(learned). In an initial encounter with 660 enemy
knights, Panurge devises a trick that allows the
hero’s four companions to destroy all their ad-
versaries, thus demonstrating the superiority of
wit over force in military operations (25). Pan-
tagruel immediately puts this knowledge to good
use, devising a stratagem of his own to allow the
utopian Amaurotes to surprise and overwhelm
hundreds of thousands of besieging soldiers (28).
The war is won by Pantagruel alone, however,
when he defeats Loup Garou and all his 299
giant henchmen in single combat (29).
Epistémon, decapitated during this final battle
and resuscitated by Panurge, relates that in Hades
the rich and the powerful of this world (epic he-
roes, kings, emperors, popes) all serve menial
functions (30). On learning this, Panurge pre-
pares the defeated Anarche for his future role in
Hell by making him green sauce crier (31), while
Pantagruel establishes a new Golden Age of
peace, justice, and evangelical Christianity in
Utopie. The narrator, meanwhile, has ventured
into the hero’s mouth, where he discovers an
entire country that seems to be France (32). The
epic ends anticlimactically as Pantagruel is
purged of a gastric malady and the narrator
promises to tell the rest of his tale in a sequel.
The thread that holds this rambunctious and
variegated narrative together is the idea that the
world as we know it is tainted with murder and
violence, that universal peace and harmony will
result only from a systematic inversion of the old
medieval order and all its hierarchies, and that
humanistic learning is the natural ally of the
meek in spirit in the establishment of such an
evangelical Utopia.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Gérard Defaux, Le curieux, le glorieux
et la sagesse du monde dans la première moitié du
seizième siècle: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, De-
mosthène, Empédocle), French Forum Monographs 34
(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982); Edwin M. Du-
val, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Raymond C. La
Charité, Recreation, Reflection and Re-creation: Per-
spectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel, French Forum
Monographs 19 (Lexington, KY: French Forum,
1980); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folk-
lore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Edwin M. Duval
PANTAGRUELION (3BK 49–52) Rabelais’s
Third Book of Pantagruel ends with four cryptic
chapters (49–52) in the form of a paradoxical
eulogy meant to parallel Panurge’s opening
Praise of Debts (2–5). As the companions pre-
pare to put to sea and visit the Oracle of the Holy
Bottle, Pantagruel takes on board a large supply
of a mysterious product called Pantagruelion,
which the narrator, following Pliny’s Natural
History (19–20), describes as a textile plant
(hemp, flax) with numerous manufactured appli-
cations (clothes, ropes, sails, etc.). At the same
time, Pantagruelion takes on many other forms,
including fire-resistant asbestos, mood-enhancing
hashish (cannabis sativa), and the “philosopher’s
stone” (OC 1454). More enigmatically, its many
virtues are supposed to bring human beings to-
gether and make them conquer the universe. This
frightens the Olympian gods, for Pantagruel’s
children, they fear, may “invade the regions of
the moon, enter the celestial signs, and take our
goddesses as wives, which is the only means of
being deified” (51).
Numerous interpretations of the episode have
been proposed. For the editors of the early
twentieth-century critical edition of Rabelais’s
Œuvres, it was a “technical enigma” meant to be
deciphered as the symbol of the Renaissance be-
lief in human industry and progress (Lefranc
1931; Plattard 1910). For supporters of Rabe-
lais’s Erasmian evangelism, however, the
enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key

to Rabelais’s hidden thought: the magic plant had
to be decoded as a veiled message of steadfast
faith in the face of persecution. For political rea-
sons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious de-
vice of enigmatic speech, covertly appealing to
his contemporaries for a tacit attitude toward
evangelical freedom (Saulnier’s “hesuchist” the-
ory). In hermeneutical terms, Pantagruel’s epon-
ymous plant could thus be an emblem of inter-
pretive progress toward the full revelation of
divine meaning, given the assured unfolding of
salvation history (Quint 1983).
More recent scholarship has generally focused
on the rhetorical aspects of the episode, stressing
its place within the formal or moral structure of
the book and displaying the self-reflexive move-
ment of the encomium as a symbol of textual
productivity (Bernard 1981; Delègue 1983; Ras-
son 1984; Rigolot 1972, 1996). Rabelais shares
a fascination for paradox with many of his con-
temporaries. In the Pantagruelion chapters, how-
ever, lyricism becomes an end in itself, distin-
guishing the episode from other satirical
eulogies of burlesque intent (Colie 1966; Losse
1980; Screech 1958). Other readings of the epi-
sode are based on the confrontation between Ra-
belais’s satirical genius, his evangelical leanings,
and the Renaissance literary tradition. For the
first time in the Third Book, Rabelais signs his
name as an author who seeks literary recognition.
His desire to counteremulate his great predeces-
sors might best be fulfilled by creating a mock-
lyric emblem of its own, a modern equivalent of
the laurel for self-glorification (Rigolot 1989).
At the same time, deciphering the meaning of
this emblematic plant is complicated by its am-
bivalent, often negative aspects. (Ropes are also
used to hang people, and hemp seeds can cause
sterility.) To be sure, there is a double edge to
this so-called miraculous plant. It is the source
of seemingly inexhaustible possibilities and it
contains the threat of extinction of the human
race. As such it reminds one of Plato’s phar-
macon: a wonderful remedy in which there al-
ways lurks the danger of poisoning, impotence,
and death (Delègue 1983). Thus, as Edwin Du-
val (1997: 209–214) has compellingly remarked,
“the enigma of Pantagruelion seems to resist any
completely satisfactory interpretation and to re-
Pantagruelion 177
main enigmatic and frustratingly ambivalent to
the end.” As such, it appears to serve as “a kind
of final test of our own skill and understanding
as interpreters.” Yet, the problem may be less a
hermeneutic one than a moral one. Perhaps we
should not be fooled by a narrator who, much
like Panurge, tries to impress us with his soph-
istry as he lets himself be carried away by his
own rhetoric. Although the eventual ascent to
the heavenly seats of the gods, which Pantagrue-
lion makes possible, undoubtedly represents the
narrator’s quest for immortality, Rabelais’s
choice of an ambivalent enigma as a literary form
functions as a productive strategy for questioning
his own fictional project. The Tiers livre is a
book about interpretation, and it begins and ends
appropriately with an interpretive problem—an
enigma that allows for the duplicitous nature of
Rabelais’s authorial self-creation as it both re-
produces and subverts the analogical system of
emblematic representations.
Readings: Claudie E. Bernard, “Le pantagruélion
entre nature et culture,” Degré second, Studies in
French Literature 5 (July 1981): 1–20; Rosalie Colie,
Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1966); Yves Delègue, “Le pantagruelion,
ou le discours de la vérité,” RHR 16 (1983): 18–40;
Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre
de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Mireille Huchon,
ed., Rabelais, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard,
1994); Abel Lefranc, Œuvres de Rabelais, vol. 5, Le
tiers livre (Paris: H. Champion, 1931); Deborah N.
Losse, Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy
(Berne: Peter Lang, 1980); Anna Ogino, Les eloges
paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart livre de Rabelais.
Enquête sur le comique et le cosmique à la Renais-
sance (Tokyo: France Tosho, 1989); Jean Plattard,
L’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris: H. Champion, 1910); Da-
vid Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Lit-
erature. Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983); Luc Rasson, “Rabelais et la
maı̂trise: l’exemple du Tiers Livre,” Revue belge de
philologie et d’histoire 62.3 (1984): 493–503; Fran-
çois Rigolot, “Encomie et botanique,” Les langages de
Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996); François Rigolot,
“Rabelais’s Laurel for Glory: A Further Study of the
Pantagruelion,” RQ 42.1 (Spring 1989): 60–77;
Verdun-Louis Saulnier, “L’enigme du pantagruelion,”
ER 1 (1956): 48–72; Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Le des-
178 Pantagruelism
sein de Rabelais (Paris: SEDES, 1957), rpt. in his Ra-
belais dans son enquête, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983);
Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage
(London: Arnold, 1958).
François Rigolot
PANTAGRUELISM A term invented by Ra-
belais to denote the characteristic virtues and
qualities of his hero Pantagruel. Essentially a
form of Christian charity, Pantagruelism consists
in a cheerful spirit of benevolence, generosity,
and joy that overlooks imperfections, pardons of-
fenses, and disregards adversity for the sake of
good companionship, conviviality, and commun-
ion.
Pantagruelism is defined for the first time in
the prologue to the Third Book (1546) as the
benevolence the narrator hopes to find in his
own readers. Acutely conscious of the imperfec-
tions of his own book, the narrator worries that
the Third Book will be despised by those he
wishes to please. But he is reassured by the
knowledge that his chosen readers possess “a
certain specific form (as the old scholars used to
say), a definite, unique character trait which our
ancestors called Pantagruelism, proving that they
will never take offense at things which, as they
know perfectly well, spring from a good, loyal,
open heart. I’ve often seen them take goodwill
as their only payment, and take it gladly, when
their debtor clearly couldn’t pay them with any-
thing else” (GP 246). This well-known passage
defines a frame of mind that does not easily take
offense, but rather inclines to view the necessar-
ily imperfect words and deeds of fellow mortals
in the most favorable light, overlooking any
flaws and pardoning any offense they may con-
tain. Thanks to this quality, Rabelais’s readers
will not be scandalized by his book but will wel-
come it, receiving it in the spirit in which it is
offered.
Within the Third Book, this same quality is
attributed to Pantagruel and illustrated by all his
actions. Informed of Panurge’s outrageous mis-
management of his newly acquired fief, for ex-
ample, Pantagruel “was neither indignant, angry,
nor sad. . . . He took everything just as it came,
putting everything in the best possible light; he
never tortured himself with anxiety, and never
permitted himself to be scandalized by anything”
(GP 251). The entire Third Book can in fact be
read as a narrative of Pantagruelism in action, as
the hero again and again “interprets” the foolish
and often offensive words of Panurge and others
in the best possible sense. This kind of heroic
Pantagruelism is associated throughout the book
with canonical definitions of charity: “forgive us
our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors”
(Matt. 6.12); “judge not, and you will not be
judged; condemn not, and you will not be con-
demned; forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Lk.
6.37); “love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor.
13.7); etc.
Before the Third Book, the word “Pantagruel-
isme” occurs only once, and with no trace of its
later meaning. (Gargantua is advertised on its
title page as a “book full of Pantagruelism.”) But
as early as 1534, passages containing cognates
like “Pantagruelistes” and “Pantagrueliser” al-
ready hint at the quality that will eventually be
named Pantagruelism. In the prologue to Gar-
gantua, for example, the narrator shrugs off the
criticism that his books “smell of wine more than
of oil”: “To be a jolly man, a good friend, a good
boozer—to me, that spells honor and glory. And
that well-deserved reputation makes me welcome
anytime Pantagruelists sit down together” (GB
9). He then urges his readers to avoid the ex-
ample of his overly critical censors, and instead
to put the best possible interpretation on his
books: “Nevertheless, interpret everything I do
and say in the most gracious light” (GP 9). A
similar passage occurs in a text inserted some
eight years later (in 1542) into the epilogue of
Pantagruel. Here the narrator rails against certain
censors who have condemned his books, and he
advises his readers that if they wish to be “good
Pantagruelists (which means to live peacefully,
happily, and healthily, always having a good
time), never trust anyone who looks out at you
from under a cowl” (GP 235), they must flee all
hypocrites, inquisitors, and calumniators. Given
the obvious similarities between these passages
and those quoted above from the Third Book, the
as-yet-unnamed quality they ascribe to Rabe-
lais’s readers may properly be viewed as Panta-
gruelism avant la lettre.
After the Third Book, Pantagruelism is no
longer an important concept. The hero of the

Fourth Book (1552) still embodies that quality
in many of his actions, but neither the word nor
its definition occurs in the text, and the narrator
no longer solicits anything like Pantagruelism in
his readers. (An increasingly bitter Rabelais is
more inclined to condemn the calumny of his
enemies than to appeal to the good-will of his
friends.) The word “Pantagruelism” does occur
parenthetically in the prologue to the Fourth
Book, but is now defined much more narrowly to
suggest something more akin to Horatian epicu-
reanism: “a certain gaiety of spirit, an indiffer-
ence to all the accidents of daily life” (GP 383).
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva:
Droz, 1997): 187–221; Edwin Duval, “Interpretation
and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to
Gargantua” ER 18 (1985): 1–17.
Edwin M. Duval
PANURGE One of the greatest characters in
Rabelais’s books, Panurge makes his memorable
first appearance in chapter 9 of Pantagruel, as
an indigent vagabond who has nearly been
roasted and eaten alive by the Turks (P 14). De-
spite his disheveled appearance, Panurge already
demonstrates his extraordinary powers by asking
Pantagruel for help and food in a dozen differ-
ent languages, among them Greek and Hebrew,
which joined Latin as the most important learned
languages of the Renaissance. The character’s
role in Pantagruel is a brilliant one and threatens
to eclipse that of the work’s protagonist. In these
early chapters, the text pauses to consider his
protean nature, evident in his linguistic display,
describing a series of adventures that interrupt
the narrative trajectory or “design” of the Rabe-
laisian text, which scholars have described as a
kind of Bildungsroman of the Christian, human-
ist prince of the Renaissance.
Panurge as a character type is derived from a
number of narrative and folkloric traditions, both
ancient and medieval. As Edwin Duval writes,
Panurge has been “variously associated with Her-
mes, the god of magic, arcane knowledge, rhet-
oric, subterfuge, and theft; with Till Eulenspiegel
and Maistre Pierre Faifeu, the merry pranksters
of folk legend; with the Devil, that malevolent
worker of mischief in the world who leaves be-
hind him fire and the smell of sulfur; and with
Panurge 179
Ulysses, the classical exemplar of worldly curi-
osity” (Duval 1991: 63). This association with
the primal figures of folk tales, such as the trick-
ster, means that Panurge is a character whose
textual being is cyclical, cosmic, and carnival-
esque, to use Bakhtin’s terms, as opposed to the
linear figure of Pantagruel to whom he acts as a
foil and alter ego. The initial chapters of his in-
troduction (P 9, 14–25), which may seem epi-
sodic and somewhat random to a modern reader,
are in fact written in the comic narrative code
that was characteristic of late medieval stories,
such as the fabliaux and the Cent nouvelles nou-
velles, and which was still alive and well in Ren-
aissance France, in popular festivals into which
Gargantua and Pantagruel would later be incor-
porated in public readings.
Like so many of his predecessors from this
tradition—the millers, Franciscans, and gentils
compagnons of comic tales, for example—Pan-
urge is curiously associated with an animalistic,
almost infantile cosmos in which a gluttonous
appetite for food and an explosive scatology
merge with a sadistic desire to inflict (at least
mock) suffering on others, often in the form of
undesirable substances (eggs, feces, urine, vomit,
dirty oil) that are smeared on the bodies of un-
suspecting victims. Panurge himself is wrapped
in lard by the Turks and roasted on a spit, then
chased and bitten by dogs just before he makes
his escape. After meeting Pantagruel, he turns the
tables and becomes a torturer himself, especially
of the maı̂tres ès arts in the Latin quarter, dis-
playing a formidable arsenal of tricks, including
various means of smearing feces on unsuspecting
students and of attaching fox tails or rabbit ears
to the backs of their robes. His wardrobe contains
a number of secret pockets in which he keeps a
sharp knife for cutting purses, a pair of dice for
flimflamming on the streets, various powders that
make people sneeze, and cones full of lice and
fleas that he throws on women at mass.
This version of Panurge as gremlin reaches its
culmination in the notorious section of the work
(P 22) in which he plays a bon tour on a
Haughty Parisian Lady who refuses his sexual
advances. The procession of big and little dogs
who subsequently cover her body in urine as a
result of Panurge’s trick has been read as a par-
ody of the Corpus Christi procession and even as
180 Papacy
a symbol of “cosmic regeneration” by Bakhtin
(Bakhtin 1984: 229–31). While the ferocity of
this single episode has engendered a considerable
flow of scholarly ink, Panurge’s inexcusable mi-
sogyny should be read in the context of his an-
tagonism toward almost every other social group
represented in the work—from “sugary” ladies
to lowly students, from farcical experts to trav-
eling English charlatans. In general, Panurge as
character reproduces attitudes and actions that
function as literary commonplaces within the tra-
dition of comic literature that Rabelais inherited
from the Middle Ages. As such, he literally is a
compendium of signs meant to signify comic at-
tributes within a specific, historically contingent
narrative tradition. In this sense, his “debate by
signs” with the Englishman Thaumaste (P 19–
20), in which Rabelais puts forth a dazzling se-
ries of meaningless yet somehow suggestive vi-
sual gestures, is perhaps the culminating point of
his description in Pantagruel.
If the Panurge who appears in Pantagruel is
the devilish alter ego of Pantagruel the humanist
prince, then the Panurge of the Third Book per-
sonifies the kind of paranoid masculinity that
subtended both the serious clerical literature on
marriage and the comic tales that depicted the
ubiquitous figure of the cuckold. (In fact, in the
Fourth Book, Dindenault immediately recog-
nizes Panurge as a cuckold [4BK 5]). The re-
dundancy that was apparent in Panurge’s earlier
introduction takes over both his character and the
entirety of Rabelais’s Third Book, in which the
character merely travels from place to place re-
peatedly seeking an answer to the question as to
whether he will be cuckolded by his future wife
if he marries. While the transformation of Pan-
urge from charlatan and trickster in Pantagruel
to potential cuckold in the Third Book may be
read as an example of inconsistent character de-
velopment, Panurge’s obsession with signs, por-
tents, and omens could be interpreted as the log-
ical next step in the development of a character
whose entire being on the page is devoted to the
exposition of multiple series of comic, narrative
signs and icons, from steaming turds to decorated
codpieces. Read from this perspective, the Pan-
urge of the Third Book is a pretext for a set of
variations on Rabelais’s favorite theme: the re-
lation between signs and their signification, and
between the apparent “surface” of the text and
its ultimate “meaning” for the reader. In this
sense, the forlorn Panurge of the Third Book be-
comes an allegorical figure in his quest for an
answer to a simple question and represents per-
haps the plight of the reader who seeks a kind
of impossible knowledge from the books that he
or she reads. If the ultimate lesson of the Third
Book is that the future cannot be foretold, then
Panurge leaves behind his childish, prankster
persona at least temporarily and assumes the
more serious aspect of a reader who seeks the
true meaning beyond the surface of textual phe-
nomena.
Panurge the trickster and charlatan returns,
however, in the famous episode of the moutons
or sheep of the Fourth Book (5–8), in which all
of his major characteristics—verbal bombast as-
sociated with sexuality, scatology, vigorous yet
meaningless debates, comic violence inflicted on
others—resurface forcefully. According to Gér-
ard Defaux, Panurge’s ferocity, thoroughly en-
meshed in the vitriol of Rabelais’s rhetoric in this
masterpiece, reflects the author’s reaction to the
difficult political and religious situation in which
he found himself and is hence one of the key
elements that must be grasped if one is to un-
derstand this last of his completed books. In con-
clusion, as paradoxical and inscrutable as Pan-
urge may seem, his character and attributes are
crucial to Rabelais’s oeuvre, the profound mul-
tiplicity of which cannot be appreciated without
an attentive reading of this puzzling and devilish
figure.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984); Gérard Defaux, introduction
to the Quart Livre (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994); Ed-
win Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Carla Frec-
cero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the
Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 22),” JMRS 15.1
(Spring 1985): 57–67; Raymond C. La Charité, Rec-
reation, Reflection, and Re-creation: Perspectives on
Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington, KY: French Forum,
1980).
David LaGuardia
PAPACY The government of the Roman pon-
tif, who heads up the Western Christian church.

The papacy during Rabelais’s time was held by
a series of popes from grand Italian families
(e.g., della Rovere, Medici, and Farnese). Such
wealth, power, and influence rivaled that of
Spain and France, kingdoms that the popes con-
sistently played against one another. Sumptuous
and extravagant, the existence of the Roman Cu-
ria resembled a courtly lifestyle. Great artists
flourished thanks to papal patronage. Nepotism,
simony, and mistresses were not uncommon.
However, the Holy See considered itself above
terrestrial kingdoms; it claimed that the Pope
oversaw temporal authority as the representative
of God on earth. Rabelais uses the Papimanes,
who revere the holy “butt and balls” of the Pope,
to poke fun at the idolatry of a preening pontiff
(4BK 48). Their irreverent neighbors the Pap-
efigues replaced the portrait of the Pope with a
fig (4BK 45).
During the sixteenth century, the papacy was
in crisis inside and out. Abuses had taken their
toll, creating a climate of corruption. The resis-
tance to Church reform alternated between a Cu-
ria that stymied papal efforts and popes that re-
mained unresponsive to calls for action. The
early Reformation pressed the question from
outside Rome, raising the bugbear issue of
whether the Pope or the Council had ultimate
authority in the Church. Rabelais mocks the
bickering over who had the upper hand in the
ludicrous trial of Baisecul and Humevesne (P
10–12). Papal politics retarded the calling of the
Council of Trent until it was too late to mend
fences. Even then, it was dominated by Italian
clergy, and Rabelais parodies the council’s doc-
trinal discussions in the reactions of the main
characters to the storm in the Fourth Book (18–
22). Martin Luther went from addressing a
good Pope trapped in a “Babylonian captivity”
of evil advisers to calling him the Antichrist. In
France, the kingdom (even the Sorbonne) had
always exercised its own prerogative. Rabelais
shares a brand of royalist Gallicanism with his
patrons the du Bellays, and his work often shows
support of their policies at crucial political mo-
ments. During his trips to Rome in the entourage
of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Rabelais saw the
Roman Church at first hand. His critiques per-
haps speak to this experience. It is significant that
Rabelais felt free to express his distrust of Ro-
Papimanes and Papefigues 181
man Church politics and the “legalese” of papal
law statutes, the Décrétales (4BK 49–53).
Readings: Jean Batany, “Les ‘Quatre Estats’ de l’Ile
des Papimanes,” BAARD 3.10 (1981): 425–29; Rich-
ard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’eglise,” Rabelais et son
demi-millénaire: Actes du colloque international de
Tours (14–29 Septembre 1984), ER 21 (Geneva: Droz,
1988); Lawrence Kritzman, “Rabelais in Papimania:
Power and the Rule of the Law,” RR 75 (1984): 25–
34; Michael A. Screech, L’évangelisme de Rabelais:
Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siècle, ER 2
(Geneva: Droz, 1959).
Amy C. Graves
PAPIMANES AND PAPEFIGUES (4BK 45–
48, 49–54) These two episodes in Rabelais’s
Fourth Book are part of a cluster that also in-
cludes Quaresmeprenant, L’Isle Farouche, and
the physetere. At the level of generality, the phy-
setere (fusis teras), a natural monstrosity that all
fear, represents death. Speculation on the foul
waters (or figuratively, writings) that spout from
its mouth and head might ascribe to it a species
of death deriving from the cascade of religious
pamphlets associated with Reformist polemics,
that is, the factional disputes that Rabelais attacks
in the fouaces or “flatcakes” episode (G 25) and
in the 1552 prologue to the Fourth Book. But as
generic Death the monster is conquered by the
replicate Christ, Pantagruel, not by cross and
resurrection as Jesus, the Great Pan, conquered
death, but by a fleet drawn up in a Y formation,
that is, by human reproduction. This is not sim-
ply the physical reproduction envisaged by Gar-
gantua (P 8), but rather the intercourse of minds
and ideas, ensuring the transmission of thought
from generation to generation. It is how that
transmission is to take place that lies at the heart
of Panurge’s perplexities about marriage.
The inhabitants of L’Isle Farouche are identi-
fied for us by Joachim du Bellay in his Regrets
(135) as “Swiss people, whom the good Rabelais
named ‘Sausages’ ” (“Suysses . . . que le bon Ra-
belais a surnommez Saulcisses”), who by their
generic designation are Swiss reformers (An-
douilles, Saulcissons Montigènes) with German
allies (Boudins). These are a fierce and warlike
people who by no means practice the Christian
virtues of peace and tolerance. In addition to be-
ing at daggers drawn with the Holy Wowser,
182 Papimanes and Papefigues
Quaresmeprenant, they also attack Pantagruel
and company, symbolically associated with the
true Church, without even identifying them.
They worship a bizarre God—a flying pig that
shits healing mustard on them; they are of am-
biguous sexuality, being all female but with a
queen bearing the name of Niphleseth, meaning
“penis”; once transported into the peace and
plenty of Utopia, they ultimately die out. Given
this negative portrayal of reformers, it is unlikely
that Rabelais was a Protestant.
Papimanie or Papimania, the last visit in the
cluster, presents us at the outset with a paradox.
The island is blessed, or benoiste, and its people
are characterized as “good” (gens de bien or
bonnes gens), a term not used ironically in the
Chronicles. They recognize and welcome Pan-
tagruel and company, and the giant and his peo-
ple obviously approve them. And yet no other
island draws such heavy criticism from the com-
pany. Papal authority and its instrument, the De-
cretals, the papal presumption of being God on
earth, veneration of objects, relics, unnecessary
rituals, confessions, holy water, monastic insti-
tutions, indulgences, the self-indulgence of prel-
ates, warring popes, purgatory with its devils and
boiling cauldrons, and finally the financial levies
made on surrounding countries, especially
France, to maintain the papal institution—these
abuses and more are attacked and have led em-
inent critics to regard Rabelais as a Papefigue,
one who gives the Pope the finger.
But if we compare the Island of the Antipap-
ists with Nuts-on-the-Popeland, we find it deso-
late, storm-ridden, and overrun by devils, as the
Papefigues eke out a precarious living. In Papi-
mania, Pantagruel and his followers partake in
the rituals and feasts; in fact that is the only visit
during which they take mass in the whole ex-
pedition. In Papefiguière, however, they go into
a chapel to take holy water and are then merely
witnesses of events. In the spectrum of sixteenth-
century sects reflected in this cluster of episodes,
the Papefigues, by the maintenance of ritual and
doctrine and the rejection of papal authority,
most resemble the Gallican/Anglican movement
in the Church. Rabelais does not belong there!
To understand this paradox, it is useful to look
at two symbolic features, the nose and woman,
both of which are of pivotal importance in the
Papefigues episode. The nose is a symbol of wit,
reason, and wisdom in the Chronicles: Frère
Jean has a big nose, Socrates is given one
against the evidence that his real nose was flat
(G prol.), and the people of Ennasin have no
noses. In the instance of the Papefigue farmer,
who has kept the devil at bay for successive
years by mental astuteness, he has taken refuge
in a stoup of holy water (Scripture) with only his
nose (or his native wit) sticking out. Meanwhile,
his wife undertakes the scratching match the
devil has demanded, to resolve the dispute be-
tween them. She sends the little brute running for
his life by opening her legs and displaying the
token of her femininity, symbolizing the power
of doctrine (see Symbolic System).
The symbols of the nose (wit, wisdom) and
woman (doctrine) also feature prominently in
Papimania. Homenaz, the bishop of Papimania,
carries wisdom in the second half of his name—
Home–naz—and dispenses it to Frère Jean and
Pantagruel in the course of the banquet offered
to the guests. This contrasts sharply with the rid-
icule heaped on Homenaz in the satiric sections
of the episode. The true Church as hypothesized
by Rabelais is made up of a utopian figure—
Pantagruel, perfect replicate Christ—and imper-
fect beings—Frère Jean in the Church and Pan-
urge, the humanist mind. Homenaz is human and
therefore imperfect; he therefore carries in his
name the wisdom of his episcopal office and the
imperfections of his humanity. He represents
symbolically the paradox on which the episode
is based.
It is in the banquet that the paradox is resolved
in the figures of the Serving Maidens (Clerices)
and the Good Christian Pears (Bonchretien
Pears). Banquets in the Chronicles are the hu-
manist equivalents of Communion—Symposia.
In the Papimanian banquet, the guests are waited
on at table by Clerices who are both Clarisses,
the Little Sisters of Saint Claire, and female
clerks (i.e., in Holy Orders). If Homenaz by his
name is a Man/mind, then Clerices symbolize
Church Ideas or doctrines. They are all virgins,
that is, doctrines not yet promulgated. When they
are summoned (“Clerice, esclaire ici” [4BK 53]),
they pour the wine of the Holy Spirit to enlighten
the proceedings. Frère Jean lusts for them (4BK
54). Now Panurge is a repentant lecher and lust-

ful by nature, but this is the first and only time
in all the chronicles that Frère Jean lusts. Why?
Because the Clerices belong in the Church, in his
domain. Homenaz reproves him, and when Pan-
tagruel departs from Papimania he leaves a
dowry for the Clerices who will be married in
due time. He also takes with him the unique
product of the Island—Good Christian Pears, to
grow and multiply back home in Utopia.
Rabelais uses paradox as a regular means of
revealing the higher sense of his work (G prol).
Here then is the resolution of this paradox. Hu-
manity in the figures of Frère Jean and Panurge
is imperfect; so also is Homenaz in Papimania,
the Church of Rome, the home of good Chris-
tians. Yet Pantagruel, the exemplar of the Perfect
Church, says of the Roman Church, “I never saw
better Christians than these Papimanians.” Its im-
perfections are many and often absurd, but in the
office of the Man/Bishop there is also the nose—
inherent wisdom—and the island contains the
Clerices, doctrines for the future. Of all the
places in this cluster of sects, Protestants, Galli-
cans, and Romans, it is surprisingly the Papi-
manes for which Rabelais shows the most affin-
ity. The Reform commonplaces with which the
episodes and particularly the last are full are a
smoke screen intended to distract the reader; the
sustantificque mouelle or marrow lies above and
behind them. Faith, patience, and tolerance in
love will in time bring ignorant and imperfect
humanity to understanding and fulfillment. This
is the lesson at the heart of the Rabelaisian mes-
sage, seen throughout the Chronicles, but specif-
ically in the Couillatris story of the Fourth Book
prologue, the Clerices in Papimania, and the Bot-
tle episode of the Fifth Book. A delightful irony
runs all through the story. Pantagruel, the true
Church, the Body of Christ on earth, judges by
his presence the imperfect earthly Church and its
head, the Pope, self-styled Deum in terra.
Readings: Fred W. Marshall, “Papimania, the
Blessed Isle: Rabelais’ Attitude to the Roman
Church,” AJFS 31.3 (1994): 245–58; Verdun L. Saul-
nier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquête; Etude
sur le Quart et le Cinquième livre (Paris: SEDES,
1982); Michael A. Screech, “Sagesse de Rabelais: Ra-
belais et les ‘bons Christians,’ ” ER 21 (Geneva: Droz,
1988): 9–15; Michael A. Screech, L’evangelisme de
Paris 183
Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siè-
cle, ER 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1959).
Fred W. Marshall
PARIS A noisy, bustling, crowded urban cen-
ter, with a widely variable population (150,000
to 300,000 inhabitants over the course of the six-
teenth century). Clearly one of the major com-
mercial centers of France, it was also an impor-
tant university town. As a royal city, its political
centrality was evident. The majority of Parisians
remained staunchly Catholic throughout the cen-
tury. The conservative scholasticism that domi-
nated the faculties of the Sorbonne (theology,
medicine, canon law, and the arts) at first stifled
the sort of literary Renaissance that was flour-
ishing in Lyon, even if a number of colleges in
Paris housed inspiring humanist scholars. The
power of the Sorbonne included control over
censorship and participation in the persecution
of heretics.
Paris contained four distinct parts: Ile de la
Cité, the religious and judicial heart of the city,
where Nôtre Dame and the Palais de Justice were
located; “la Ville,” on the Right Bank, where
commerce dominated; the Latin Quarter, site of
the university and a number of colleges; and the
faubourgs, located outside of the twelfth- and
fourteenth-century walls.
In G 17 and P 7, the narrator mocks Parisians
as stupid, superstitious, and gullible. Panurge’s
famous suggestion to improve the fortifications
of Paris (P 15) reflects not only an expanding
population ill served by the medieval defenses,
but also the reputation for promiscuity that had
attached itself to the city. Panurge’s pranks re-
semble extreme versions of those played by the
boisterous students of the Latin Quarter (P 16).
The episode of the Haughty Parisian Lady (P
21–22) reveals tensions at play in the city: re-
sentment of the rich and of their privileges on
the part of the numerous poor, and the extreme
misogyny that existed. Panurge’s trick is an ugly
urban version of the carnivalesque behavior that
often turned violent.
The first execution in Paris of an accused Prot-
estant (Lutheran) heretic took place in 1523. Re-
ligious repression escalated after the Affaire des
Placards (1534), when posters against Catholic
mass were posted all around Paris and elsewhere
184 Parlement
in France. In January 1535, an elaborate proces-
sion was held, in the course of which Francis I
demonstrated his devotion to the Catholic faith,
and six convicted heretics were burned at the
stake. Rabelais’s relatively open criticism of the
Sorbonne, the cult of saints, and other aspects of
Catholicism are remarkable in the context of this
repression.
Architecturally and artistically, Rabelais’s
Paris was still more of a medieval than a Ren-
aissance city. Francis had literally brought the
Italian Renaissance to the Loire Valley and to
the Ile de France region, but the rebuilding of the
Louvre was not undertaken until the end of his
reign. Major projects only came to fruition in the
second half of the sixteenth century.
Readings: Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross:
Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Pierre Mi-
quel, Les guerres de religion (Paris: Fayard, 1980);
William Monter, Judging the French Reformation:
Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); David
Thomson, Renaissance Paris (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
Kathleen Perry Long
PARLEMENT Currently, a legislative body
consisting of the Senate and National Assembly,
France’s Parlement (from “parler,” meaning “to
speak”) developed during the Middle Ages from
the King’s Court (Curia Regis) and was the
country’s highest judicial body under the Ancien
Régime. Divided into multiple chambers during
the Renaissance, including the infamous Cham-
bre Ardente (“Burning Chamber”) where accused
heretics were tried in the late 1540s and early
1550s, Parlement enjoyed both inflated ranks, the
result of royal venality or the crown’s willing-
ness to appoint new magistrates in exchange for
money, and increased power and autonomy in
the sixteenth century.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the monarchy’s
active role in choosing judges, there is little ev-
idence that the court’s decisions were unduly in-
fluenced by the king. In fact, the magistrates rou-
tinely delayed action on royal proposals that did
not suit them, including a plan by Francis I to
establish a new Chambre des Enquêtes in 1521
(Roelker 1996: 10). True, conservative groups
within the high court actively supported the Sor-
bonne’s suppression of religious dissidence,
earning Parlement a reputation for rubber stamp-
ing the Faculty of Theology’s antiheretical
edicts. However, Nancy Lyman Roelker suggests
that the Parlement of Paris actually consisted of
humanists, reform sympathizers, and centrists as
well as conservatives.
Rabelais’s own attitude toward and references
to “parlement” are mixed. While on occasion he
uses the term generically to mean “talk” or “dis-
cussion,” at times his superficially positive allu-
sions to Parlement, within a legal context, leave
room for satiric interpretations. For instance,
Panurge bases his extravagant expenditures on
examples set by the Sorbonne and Parlement
(3BK 2); Pantagruel considers the wisdom dis-
played by a Parisian fool to be equal to that of
France’s high court (3BK 37); and the Mirelin-
guan parliament, often identified with the Paris
Parlement, is characterized as “evil and corrupt”
(3BK 44). Yet in his allegory of Messere Gaster,
Rabelais’s vision of a world without parlements,
and ruled by poverty, is troublingly ambivalent:
for if the resulting lack of order recalls Picro-
chole’s reign of rage in Gargantua, a cautionary
episode advocating a “parliamentary” or dialogic
approach to problem solving, it also suggests,
much more darkly, that the judiciary itself is
driven by personal interest, that principles of jus-
tice are routinely perverted by base human ap-
petites, and that “all laws” are futile in the face
of poverty, hunger, and greed (see also Heresy;
Judiciary).
Readings: Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One
Faith. The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Ref-
ormations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1996).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
PARODY See Imitation and Parody
PAUL, SAINT (c. A.D. 3 – c. 65) The name by
which Saul of Tarsus has come to be known to
history. Many Christians consider Paul to have
been the most important disciple of Jesus of Naz-
areth (although he never met him) and next to
Jesus the most important figure in the early de-
velopment of Christianity. He is also one of the
primary sources of early Church doctrine, since

approximately one-third of the New Testament
canon consists of epistles ascribed to him. Paul’s
major contribution in reaching out to non-Jews
was his contention that the “literal” requirements
of Jewish ritual and practice had been superseded
by belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah and
that this faith alone guaranteed salvation. Augus-
tine’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching on origi-
nal sin, the corruption of human nature, grace,
faith, and free will became authoritative for
Western Christianity.
It was the mature Luther’s liberating encoun-
ter with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans which led
him to challenge a thousand years’ accretion of
human traditions that had obscured the purity and
brilliance of the primitive Church. Paul’s teach-
ing that justification comes by faith alone prom-
ised deliverance from the massive, corrupt eccle-
siastical establishment which had imposed itself
between individual believers and their God, re-
placing Christ as the only true Mediator and Ad-
vocate. This regenerative aspect of the early Lu-
theran message appealed to believers in France
variously known as bibliens, réformistes, or
évangéliques. Marguerite d’Angoulême and
Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet gathered together
in the “Cercle de Meaux” like-minded evangeli-
cal humanists, including Jacques Lefèvre
d’Etaples and Clément Marot. Only in this con-
text can we understand Rabelais’s relentless at-
tacks on unworthy clerics, mindless rituals and
ceremonies, rote memorization of meaningless
words and formulas, blind obedience to absurd
traditions, idolatrous adoration of saints and
popes, pilgrimages, and the like (G 45).
Readings: Robert K. Rapa, The Meaning of “Works
of the Law” in Galatians and Romans (New York:
Peter Lang, 2001); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais and
the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reforma-
tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1992); Ste-
phen Westerholm, Preface to the Study of Paul (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).
William H. Huseman
PETRARCH AND PETRARCHISM Fran-
cesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–1374), Italian
humanist and lyric poet; the imitation of his
work, especially his vernacular poetry, became
known as “Petrarchism.” Petrarch’s masterpiece,
the Rime sparse, was the prototype for a new
Petrarch and Petrarchism 185
genre, the canzoniere, a sustained sequence of
poems dedicated to a single inaccessible lady.
This work recounts the story of Petrarch’s love
for the virtuous yet desirable Laura, whom he
supposedly met in a church in Avignon. Laura’s
name also evokes, through wordplay, the image
of the laurel, symbol of poetic glory. Petrarch’s
imitators focused on his trademark rhetorical de-
vices, including antithesis, adynaton (a declara-
tion of impossibility or inexpressibility), paro-
nomasia (the use of words that sound alike but
differ in meaning), and oxymoron. They also
popularized short lyric forms, especially the son-
net, and drew from his favorite themic material,
including exaggerated descriptions of the lady’s
beauty. Petrarchism became increasingly fash-
ionable in France during the 1530s under the
reign of Francis I, who supposedly encouraged
a Lyonnais humanist, Maurice Scève, to locate
Laura’s lost tomb in a chapel of Avignon in
1533.
Although Rabelais might seem an unlikely
candidate to engage in Petrarchism, there are
nevertheless episodes in his work that exhibit
traces of this literary phenomenon, albeit in a pa-
rodic mode. The first is the story of the Haughty
Parisian lady courted by Panurge (P 21–22).
The scene of the initial encounter of the “lovers”
(in church), the lady’s inaccessibility (both so-
cially and sexually), the highly rhetorical de-
scription of her “celestial beauties,” and the com-
position of a lyric poem to win her favors are all
prominent features of Petrarchism.
A second nod to Petrarchism may be found in
G 1, a chapter that shows how the giant’s ge-
nealogy became known through the unearthing
of a long-forgotten tomb. Rabelais wrote this
chapter in Lyon at a time when Scève’s discov-
ery of Laura’s tomb would have been widely dis-
cussed. Indeed, certain details from this chapter
closely parallel the account of the discovery pub-
lished by Jean de Tournes in his 1545 dedication
(to Scève) of an edition of Petrarch’s Rime. Most
notable among these parallels is the mysterious
inscription “HIC BIBITUR” (which recalls the
equally cryptic “M.L.M.I.” or “Madonna Laura
Morte Iace” found on Laura’s tomb), as well as
the role of the narrator summoned to decipher
and transcribe the nearly illegible writing of the
genealogy that was worn with age (which cor-
186 Philautia
responds to Scève’s reading and copying of a
faded sonnet found inside Laura’s tomb).
A third recollection of Petrarchism might be
observed in the Third Book 49–52, in the enig-
matic Pantagruelion—a plant whose green
leaves evoke Petrarch’s emblematic laurel. Just
as Petrarch’s wordplay intertwined the fates of
the laurel and Laura, so too did Rabelais describe
a plant whose name evokes that of his hero.
Moreover, it has been suggested that the scat-
tered leaves fallen from the Sibyl’s tree on which
she writes the destiny of Panurge’s marriage
(3BK 16–18) may constitute a comic, literal ver-
sion of Petrarch’s Rime sparse or “scattered
rhymes.”
Readings: Carla Freccero, “Damning haughty
dames: Panurge and the haulte dame de Paris,” JMRS
15 (1985): 57–67; Enzo Giudici, “Bilancio di una an-
nosa questione: Maurice Scève e la ‘scoperta’ della
‘tomba di Laura,’ ”Quaderni di filologia e lingue ro-
manze 2 (1980): 1–70; Jean-Luc Nardonne, Pétrarque
et le pétrarquisme (Paris: PUF, 1998); François Ri-
golot, “Rabelais’s Laurel for Glory: A Further Study
of the ‘Pantagruelion,’ ” RQ 42 (1989): 60–77.
JoAnn DellaNeva
PHILAUTIA (SELF-LOVE, AMOUR DE
SOY) (3BK 29) Based on two Greek roots, Fi-
li¬a (love, affection) and ayto¬ß (self), it is the
opposite of the first principle of Christian ethics:
a¡ga¬ph, charitable love based on compassion and
unselfish concern for the well-being of others.
The term is attested in pre-Christian Greek. In
his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle presents rea-
soned philautia as the basis for all human rela-
tionships. However, the term was used more fre-
quently to denote selfishness and excessive pride.
Christianity assigned it a completely negative
meaning as “the mother of vices” (Maximus the
Confessor). According to Augustine, “two cities
have been formed by two loves: the earthly by
the love of self (amor sui), . . . the heavenly by
the love of God, even to the contempt of self”
(City of God, 14. 28). Erasmus presents Philau-
tia as one of Folly’s indispensable servants, and
Alciato uses Narcissus as the personification of
this vice in his Emblematum Liber (1546: Em-
blem 69).
Panurge, of course, incarnates philautia
throughout the Third Book. Although Panta-
gruel uses the term only once, it is an extremely
important reference that summarizes his compan-
ion’s increasingly uncontrollable narcissistic ob-
sessions: “philautie et amour de soy vous deçoit”
(3BK 29). The only possible remedy for such
destructive self-love is “le Pantagruélisme”
(3BK 2).
In a larger sense, however, the major institu-
tions denounced so virulently by Rabelais can all
be described as victims of philautia. The Church,
the monarchy, the feudal nobility, and the fac-
ulties of theology, law, and medicine had origi-
nally been established to minister to the needs of
the entire population, particularly the weak, the
sick, and the powerless; but those in authority
had transformed them into vehicles of self-
aggrandizement and self-enrichment and had
themselves become the chief beneficiaries. Ra-
belais clearly saw his humor as a means of prick-
ing their inflated egos.
Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’
Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva: Droz,
1997); Irénée Haussherr, Philautie: de la tendresse
pour soi à la charité selon saint Maxime le Confesseur
(Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Stu-
diorum, 1952); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian
Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’ Religion, Ethics, and
Comic Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1958).
William H. Huseman
PHYSETERE (4BK 33–34) The Fourth Book
whale or marine monster, which Paul J. Smith
(1987: 110) situates at the crossroads of the
mythological, biblical, and naturalistic traditions,
is virtually a requisite component of the imagi-
nary, epic voyage. Serving as an obstacle that the
hero must overcome to test his mettle, at the risk
of being swallowed up or destroyed, the physe-
tere engenders intense fear in Panurge, who in-
flates the animal’s mystique rhetorically by lik-
ening it to Leviathan or the jaws of Hell.
Pantagruel, by way of contrast, demystifies the
creature by scoffing at his friend’s terror, killing
the “monster” so easily that the episode becomes
a parody of itself (Smith 1987: 112). Moreover,
within the economy of the Fourth Book, the
whale is closely intertwined with neighboring ep-
isodes that enhance and are enriched by the sea
monster’s myriad connotations. Connected to
Physis and Antiphysie by virtue of their pho-
netic similarity, for example, the phystere also

functions implicitly as a Lenten fish in the ten-
sion between Quaresmeprenant and the reform-
ist Andouilles. Finally, the crew members’ de-
cision to dissect the whale and sell the oil from
its kidneys smacks of pragmatic maritime com-
merce, a far cry from the mythic encounter Pan-
urge imagined.
Readings: Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture. Etude
sur le quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987);
Marcel Tetel, “Le physetère bicéphale,” Writing the
Renaissance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
PHYSIS AND ANTIPHYSIE (4BK 32) An
allegory on monsters and the world upside
down that Rabelais borrows from Calcagnini and
inserts between the episodes of Quaresmepren-
ant and the physetere. In this narration, Physis
or Nature, likened to an upright tree with her
head in the air and both feet on the ground, gives
birth to Beauty and Harmony, while Antiphysie,
the opposite of Nature, produces monstrous off-
spring named Immoderation and Discord (GP
453). Profoundly envious of Nature and her per-
fect children, Antiphysie invents a myth to legit-
imate her own deformity, contending it is her
own children and not those of Nature who resem-
ble the Creator, walking with their feet in the air
and their head to the ground. While on one hand
this allegory serves as a template for Rabelais’s
creative foray into alterity and the world upside-
down, it also functions as a condemnation of
what the author deems monstrous in his own so-
ciety, especially those religious and political big-
ots who persecute the “upright,” claiming their
own unnatural theology is that of God.
Reading: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-
trophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, GIOVANNI
(1463–1494) This influential Renaissance hu-
manist was known for his syncretism and the
breadth of knowledge he brought to it, a breadth
that is also evident in Rabelais’s five books. Pico
was born in 1463, the youngest child of the count
of Mirandola. He began studies in canon law at
Bologna in 1477 and then philosophy at Ferrara
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 187
in 1479. The following year he moved to Padua,
a center of Aristotelian philosophy. There he
came under the influence of the Jewish Averroist
Elia del Medigo, who introduced him to Jewish
mysticism, the kabbala. In 1484 he settled in
Florence and became a friend of the Plato scholar
Marsilio Ficino. Pico continued to pursue his
broad intellectual interests and added Hebrew
and Arabic to his studies in Latin and Greek.
In 1486 Pico published for debate the Conclu-
siones, 900 statements on thinkers as diverse as
Plato and Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes, and
Pythagoras, and on ideas from hermetic and kab-
balistic texts as well as standard philosophy and
theology. What has come to be known as the
“Oration on the Dignity of Man” was intended
as an introduction to the theses, and it has be-
come the classic statement of the intellectual am-
bitions of the Renaissance humanist. Pico’s in-
sistence on breadth of knowledge underlies
Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8). His em-
phasis on the kabbala led to the beginnings of
Christian kabbalism, and familiarity with it is ev-
ident in Rabelais’s books: references to kabbala
and kabbalists (e.g., its inclusion in P 8) and kab-
balistic ideas (e.g., l’isle de Ruach, 4BK 43). In
1487, Pico published a kabbalist interpretation of
the creation story called Heptaplus. He also in-
tended to write a work reconciling the philoso-
phies of Plato and Aristotle but only published
one part in 1491, On Being and the One.
Pico’s earlier works suggest that he believed
that astrology could provide knowledge about
human personalities and events, but like Rabelais
and other contemporaries, he was uncomfortable
with the way prediction through astrology threat-
ened human free will. Before he died in 1494,
Pico, possibly under the influence of the Domin-
ican friar Girolamo Savonarola, decided that as-
trology was irreconcilable with Christianity and
wrote Disputations against Judicial Astrology.
It was the most widely debated work on the
subject of astrology for the century and a half
after it was written. Although Rabelais counseled
against astrological divination (e.g., G 8), he did
not go as far in his condemnation as Pico.
Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-
tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin,
“The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Panta-
188 Picrochole
gruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-
Levi and Gale Sigal (New York: AMS Press, 1992).
Sheila J. Rabin
PICROCHOLE Petty tyrant and antagonist in
Gargantua, whose name, taken from the Greek
and linked in French to colère or anger, means
“bitter bile.” Both a neighbor and a former friend
of the utopian king, Picrochole refuses to nego-
tiate following an altercation between his bakers
and the shepherds of Grandgousier’s domain,
rushing instead to arms with a precipitousness
that has been identified with the “world conquest
motif” in literature, with the military strategy of
Charles V, and with a withdrawal of God and
divine order from the world (Berrong 1985). Pi-
crochole may also be viewed as the behavioral
antipode of the anti-Machiavellian ethical and
behavioral ideals that Gargantua develops over
the course of the novel. Although his own in-
stinct as a youth was to act selfishly and impul-
sively, Gargantua matures dramatically over the
course of the Picrocholine War, following the
lead of his temperate father. In contrast to Picro-
chole, who rushes to judgment in a rage to
avenge his wounded honor, Grandgousier calmly
tries to ascertain the facts, takes the counsel of
others, and even apologizes in the interest of
peace and the common good. It is this model that
Gargantua embraces as an adult, offering leni-
ency to the prisoners he has conquered (G 50).
Readings: Richard Berrong, Every Man for Him-
self: Social order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais
(Stanford, CA: Anma Libri, 1985); Max Gauna, The
Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison: Farleigh Dickin-
son University Press, 1996).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
PLACARDS, AFFAIR OF (L’AFFAIRE DES
PLACARDS, OCTOBER 17–18, 1534) Con-
sidered a turning point in the relationship be-
tween the French crown and the Reformation.
During the night of October 17–18, copies of an
inflammatory text denouncing the mass appeared
attached to doors all over Paris, Tours, Orléans,
Blois, and Amboise. The text is attributed to a
pastor from Neuchâtel, Antoine Marcourt. The
reaction of the Parisian authorities was swift and
brutal: over three hundred people were arrested
(including the poet Clément Marot), and thirty-
five burned. In January 1535, an impressive pro-
cession was organized, during which the Parisian
clergy walked in pomp behind the king himself,
displaying many Church relics and reinforcing
the impression of Church power. Francis I even
proposed an edict in January banning all print-
ing, but the measure was soon reconsidered. The
king did mollify his reaction in 1535, owing in
part to the influence of the du Bellay family. Al-
though the affair did not mark an abrupt transi-
tion from tolerance to persecution, as has some-
times been argued, it did reveal the level of
discord within France, crystallize opposing po-
sitions, and show the extent to which the king
was willing to engage state power as a tool of
repression.
There has been debate about whether Gargan-
tua was published before or after the affair. Al-
though Rabelais makes no direct mention of the
Placards, references to the religious quarrels
abound in his work, and it is certain that the un-
rest in Paris in 1533–1534 provides much of the
inspiration for the episode of the bells (G 17–
20). When Rabelais denounces as a hoax the sal-
amander’s supposed consistency in fire (3BK
52), he may be expressing his disappointment at
what he perceived to be a change of policy by
Francis I, whose emblem was a salamander. The
voyagers of the Fourth Book, who start their
journey by singing Psalm 114 (sung by French
Reformists) have been seen by critics as emblem-
atic of a community of persecuted Protestants in
search of a more tolerant society. However, Ra-
belais spares neither side of the quarrel, as on-
going critical debates show.
Readings: Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt:
réformateur et pamphlétaire du ‘Livre des Marchans’
aux placards de 1534 (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Gérard
Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER
9 (1971): 1–28; Marcel Françon, “Note sur la datation
de Gargantua,” ER 11 (1974): 81–83; Arlette Jouanna
et al., “Présence réelle,” Histoire et Dictionnaire des
guerres de religion (Paris: Laffont, 1998); R. J.
Knecht, “Francis I, Defender of the Faith?” Wealth
and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to
S. T. Bindoff, ed. E. W. Ives, Robert J. Knecht, and
J. J. Scarisbrick (London: Athlone, 1978); Michael
Screech, introduction to François Rabelais, Gargantua
(Geneva: Droz, 1970); Michael Screech, Rabelais and

the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reforma-
tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992).
Louisa Mackenzie
PLAGUE Highly contagious, incurable sick-
ness responsible for widespread fear and death
in European populations from the Middle Ages
through the sixteenth century. Prior to settling in
Lyon, Rabelais had his first encounter with the
plague from a distance, having been prevented
from entering the city of Tours during his travels
because of an outbreak. At the time the doctor
began writing, however, fear of the plague and
an array of social reactions to it had become just
as common and harmful, though not as deadly,
as the sickness itself.
Rabelaisian textual treatment of the plague
ranges from merely mentioning an outbreak in
Angers (P 5) to Panurge’s intentional contami-
nation of Sorbonne scholars with his infamous
“tartre bourbonnoise,” a dreadful concoction
made of an array of foul-smelling ingredients
that he spread on the ground before them (P 16),
and to attributing plague’s origin in the cities of
“Laryngues et Pharingues,” located inside Pan-
tagruel’s throat, to the giant’s stinking garlic
breath (P 32). By placing deadly plague within
the realm of the carnivalesque, Rabelais ac-
knowledges a subject of concern while promot-
ing a transformation of public reaction to it; what
provoked fear may now bring laughter.
Rabelais also speaks out against fear and as-
sociations of plague and other epidemics with di-
vine punishment in Gargantua 45. Here Gran-
gousier becomes Rabelais’s mouthpiece in
severe judgment of “faulx prophetes” (false
prophets) whose influence caused those in fear to
go to great lengths to appease God and the saints
in hopes of avoiding contracting the plague.
Meeting a group of pilgrims returning from Saint
Sebastian, Grandgousier severely condemns
those who made them believe in a need to ap-
pease God and the saints as more poisonous than
the plague itself—a deadly sickness to the soul.
Rather than embarking on futile, dangerous trav-
els, Gargantua’s wise father encourages the
travelers to stay home, care for their families and
land, and work hard. Living in this way, unaf-
fected by unreasonable fear, he promises, guar-
Pliny, The Elder 189
antees that God, the angels, and the saints will
protect them from plague.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles
Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin,
1988).
Lesa Randall
PLINY, THE ELDER (GAIUS PLINIUS SE-
CUNDUS, A.D. 23–79) Author of the Natural
History (Historia Naturalis), thirty-seven books
containing a compendium of facts about the nat-
ural world. Pliny’s work is an important source
of information on Roman beliefs concerning na-
ture, and his accounts of monsters were widely
imitated during the Renaissance. Rabelais may
well have read Guillaume Budé’s edition of the
work (1532) or the 1516 Paris edition. His com-
plex attitude toward Pliny, mocking him at some
points and citing him as a reliable authority at
others, reflects the work’s status as a core text of
medieval scholasticism as well as of Renais-
sance humanism.
Perhaps Rabelais’s most famous citation of
Pliny occurs in G 3, where the narrator cites
Pliny’s claim (7,5) that pregnancies can last
eleven months. He then mockingly numbers
Pliny among the Pantagruelistes. Yet Pliny is
cited on topics, particularly in the Fourth Book,
ranging from the effect of emeralds on the libido
to the properties of a wide range of plants. Evi-
dently, Rabelais was familiar with the entirety of
the Natural History. Pliny was a crucial, if in-
accurate, source of information on distant races
and exotic plants for Renaissance readers. Ra-
belais cites Pliny’s seventh book (on strange
births) again in P 4; he may have known the
popular edition, De prodigiosis partubus, which
was influential in the production of treatises on
childbirth and teratology for the rest of the cen-
tury. Nonetheless, Rabelais rejected the “medi-
cal” information Pliny offered. Rabelais’s allu-
sions to Pliny constitute a lesson in reading:
even when faced with an authoritative text, the
reader must use some judgment to sort out useful
information from nonsense.
Readings: R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and
Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University
190 Plotinus
Press, 1954); Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Kathleen Perry Long
PLOTINUS (A.D. 205–270) A leading early
Neoplatonic philosopher, author of six books of
Enneads in Greek. Born in Egypt, Plotinus was
Hellenic in education and culture, and taught phi-
losophy in Rome. His philosophical system con-
sisted of an exposition of Plato’s dialogues, in
particular the Parmenides, and contained an im-
portant anti-Gnostic element. He presented not
only a philosophy but a religion, a way for the
mind to ascend to God, and his system was easily
assimilated by Christian thinkers. Plotinian real-
ity is founded upon three principles or “hypos-
tases”: the One, the Intellect or Being, and the
Soul. The One is that from which all proceeds.
We cannot know it or its qualities; we can only
know what it is not: this is “negative theology.”
The One is constantly overflowing into the In-
tellect, which is also the domain of Forms, a mul-
tiple unity that is the intelligible model of reality.
The Intellect in turn overflows into the Soul, a
movement in time that creates the world and the
multiplicity of individual souls. This movement
downward is known as “procession”: the reverse
movement upward, through which each hypos-
tasis contemplates its superior state, is “conver-
sion.” These processes have their parallel in the
human mind, and the implications of Plotinus’s
system for the individual’s spiritual life was of
particular interest to Renaissance thinkers.
Although Plotinus’s thought was diffused
throughout the writings of the Church Fathers
and the late Neoplatonists, the sixteenth century
knew him principally as presented by Marsilio
Ficino, who translated the Enneads into Latin in
1492. It is hard to trace a current of thought in
the sixteenth century that is purely Plotinian,
since his ideas are often tied up with Renaissance
Neoplatonism; some confusion also exists be-
tween him and Plato. Plotinus’s name is often
associated with obscure, difficult mysticism, and
it is as an obscure mystic that his name appears
in Rabelais.
Although Rabelais was directly familiar with
other Neoplatonic writers, it is unclear whether
he actually read the Enneads. Plotinus is men-
tioned twice, both in contexts that might suggest
parodic intent toward his reputation as an occult
thinker. Pantagruel reads Plotinus’s “book On
Inexpressible Things” as preparation for his de-
bate against Thaumaste (P 18). (No editor of
Rabelais to date has noticed that this is a ficti-
tious title.) Pantagruel also cites Plotinus as one
of many authorities in support of his recommen-
dation of dream interpretation to Panurge
(3BK 13). Plotinus’s influence on Renaissance
theories of dream interpretation is more general
than specific: the Plotinian conversion of the in-
dividual mind upward while asleep is certainly
based on his hypostases. The doctrine of the im-
mortality of the intellectual soul expounded by
Pantagruel (4BK 27) may also owe something to
Plotinus. To date, however, there has been very
little criticism on Plotinus in Rabelais, although
several studies on Neoplatonism have been pub-
lished.
Readings: Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mytholo-
gies (London: Associated University Presses, 1996);
Francoise Joukovsky, Le regard intérieur: thèmes plo-
tiniens chez quelques écrivains de la Renaissance
française (Paris: Nizet, 1982); Robert Marichal,
“L’attitude de Rabelais devant le néo-platonisme,”
François Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1953).
Louisa Mackenzie
PONOCRATES See Education
POPULAR CULTURE Popular culture is so
difficult to define that some critics have denied
its very existence. Giving a meaning to the
phrase requires that “culture” be interpreted in its
broad, and nowadays current, sense, which may
include habits, customs, shared beliefs, unwritten
institutions, traditional stories, rites, and obser-
vances of every kind. “Popular” culture is de-
fined in contradistinction to “elite” or “official”
culture, but what each of these expressions
means at a given time and in a given place is
hotly debated.
Plainly, the “official” culture of Rabelais’s
France, against which Mikhail Bakhtin defines
the “popular” culture celebrated, he believed, by
the Frenchman’s book, was very different from
the official culture of Stalin’s Russia by which
the critic was personally threatened. One is per-
haps on safer ground in defining popular culture
in the early modern period as the culture of the

preponderantly nonliterate as against the literate
and Latinate culture of the Church and the pro-
fessions. The difficulty that then arises is that we
can know nothing of the observances, to say
nothing of the mentality, of nonliterate people in
former times, except what survives in records
kept by the literate. Nor does the nonliterate/lit-
erate division exactly correspond to the popular/
elite one, if we are speaking of a social elite.
Low-born males in the Middle Ages and early
modern period might achieve literacy and rise in
the world through the Church (Erasmus is the
most striking example of such social mobility),
while many medieval and even some sixteenth-
century noblemen remained illiterate. (The liter-
acy of women follows different patterns and is
now beginning to be studied intensively.) Per-
haps “popular” culture is that of laypeople,
townspeople, artisans, and the rising bourgeoisie,
as against that of the Church—once a popular
idea with Marxists. But we immediately see that
many of the structures of popular culture are
taken from those of the Church—its calendar,
based on the liturgical year, pilgrimages, and lay
sodalities founded on the cult of saints, and so
on. (Rabelais, like other humanists, makes cruel
fun of such popular beliefs and observances in
Gargantua.) Much of what we think of as pop-
ular culture could thus be seen as a “trickle-
down” from elite or “official” culture, just as
many of the tales kept alive by fireside storytell-
ing or circulated in chapbooks by peddlers as late
as the nineteenth century had their origins in
“elite” poems devised and performed for noble
audiences in medieval times.
Despite the theoretical problems in defining
popular culture and the difficulty of accessing
uncontaminated examples of it, most critics of
Rabelais have worked on the assumption that
such a thing exists and that his books are at the
very least strongly colored by it. The full title of
Bakhtin’s extremely influential book is The Work
of François Rabelais and Popular Culture in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but French
critics much earlier than 1965 had already ex-
plored the popular and “folk” origins of many of
Rabelais’s motifs and verbal devices. “Popular”
elements in Rabelais are thought to include the
story itself, with its giant figures (found in pre-
existing chapbooks) credited with the creation of
Power, Discourses of 191
landscape features and archaeological remains;
the “tall-tale” humor based on disproportions of
size; the privileging of the physical in the story,
with its constant emphasis on eating, drinking,
and excretion; and the reverence for “good”
kings accompanied by mockery of unworthy au-
thority figures, particularly those associated with
the learned professions. One might add the use
of a “wily” narrator, who is never to be held to
account for the literal truth or dangerous impli-
cations of his story. The text itself is a tissue of
now recondite allusions to traditional stories,
proverbs, jokes, puns, games, and songs that
would once have been familiar to unlettered as
well as learned hearers, and perhaps more to the
former. It is thought that they could have had
access to Rabelais’s book through the then com-
mon practice of reading aloud, or storytelling, to
an audience from the point of departure of a
printed text (which is what, after all, Maistre Al-
cofrybas is supposed to be doing in the pro-
logues of Pantagruel and Gargantua).
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélenè Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early
Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); Carol
Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: Pressgang,
1983); Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et cul-
ture des elites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe
siecles) (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Jean Plattard,
L’oeuvre de Rabelais, chapter 7 (Paris: Champion,
1910).
Carol Clark
POWER, DISCOURSES OF Michel Fou-
cault has redefined the term discourse to refer to
circulating language that reflects certain types of
knowledge and generates power. This discourse
does not represent individual subjectivity, but
different loci of social and political power. The
privileged wield institutional language and deter-
mine the rules of its usage. The disempowered,
too, can use discourses of power in their favor
just as they can counter them with other regional,
professional, or class discourses reinforced by
certain circumstances. Although Foucault, struc-
turalism, and twentieth-century linguistics have
contributed to a contemporary notion of dis-
courses of power, Rabelais’s sixteenth-century
interest in language as it affected politics, relig-
192 Printing
ion, and personal lives offers many interesting
parallels. Furthermore, Rabelais’s fiction pro-
vides a wealth of discourses to analyze (for ex-
ample: legal, medical, theological, pedantic, mer-
cantile, maritime, scatological, and regional).
Verbal exchanges in Rabelais’s fiction often
take the form of interpersonal contests (G 15; P
18–19), and fear and an imbalance of power dis-
rupt speech (P 6; G 38). Those who dominate
physically or politically determine discursive
normalcy, as Pantagruel illustrates through his
threat directed at the Ecolier Limousin: “I will
teach you how to speak” (“je vous apprendray à
parler” [P 6]). These linguistic enforcers dismiss
noninstitutional discourses as unintelligible,
heretical, or foolish.
Panurge nevertheless proves that those out-
side of the dominant group can also use discourse
to advance themselves socially. His rhetorical
skill gives him access to power through imita-
tion. Simply by appropriating fragments of the
institutional discourse which he skillfully places
in alien contexts, he succeeds in furthering his
own interests (P 17). Like the Ecolier Limousin,
Panurge seeks self-glorification, but his under-
standing and manipulation of the discursive rules
meet with a happier outcome.
One of the most interesting discursive con-
frontations pits Panurge against the Haughty
Lady of Paris (P 21–22). Both of them have
claims to elements of a male, aristocratic hege-
monic discourse, but neither dominates it en-
tirely. Both vie to establish discursive superior-
ity. The Lady does not fall for Panurge’s
rhetorical trickery and code-switching because
she, too, is capable of expressing personal desires
through institutional language. Ultimately, Pan-
urge resorts to physical revenge, cowed by the
threat of the woman’s voice, if not her discourse.
Panurge’s verbal failure, however, becomes
another message in a dialogue he continues with
Pantagruel whom he calls to witness the Lady’s
demise. Rabelais tests the limits of verbal dis-
course by exploring many of the same themes
(unintelligibility, double meanings, domination)
through signs as well as through words. He iron-
ically (and perhaps wistfully) evokes the possi-
bility of a universal language of signs (G 10).
But he dedicates many more pages to semiotic
codes that intentionally restrict comprehension.
His fiction illustrates characters in a constant, and
conscious, struggle to appropriate a set of key
discourses vital to maintaining their social status.
Readings: Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Se-
lected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980);
Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge
and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel XIV),”
JMRS 15.1 (1985): 57–67; François Rigolot, Les lan-
gages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Jerome
Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures
of Subversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
Emily E. Thompson
PRINTING Invented in Germany with the
publication of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible during
the 1450s, printing came to France in 1470; and
by 1530 it was already reaching great heights of
achievement in design and technical process. By
that period the dominant centers of printing were
already Paris and Lyon, and nearly all of Ra-
belais’s early editions, printed by such noted
publishers as François Juste, Sebastian Gryphius,
and Chrétien Wechel, were produced in those
two cities.
Rabelais published at a time when the final
vestiges of manuscript practice (e.g., the use of
various “gothic” typographies, characterized by
traditional medieval letter forms, for certain clas-
ses of books) were giving way to a nearly uni-
versal adoption of the modern “roman” and
“italic” styles of type. Rabelais’s learned editions
reflect this “humanist” style, which was deemed
appropriate for scholarly works. Although Pan-
tagruel and Gargantua, in keeping with their
popular trappings, were apparently meant to be
printed in the “outdated” bâtarde of early ver-
nacular printing, a semi-cursive script related to
everyday handwriting, the first editions of the
Third and Fourth Books adopted italic and ro-
man, respectively. Rabelais understood the im-
portance and the technicalities of printing, and
this is reflected in his works.
Aside from the prologue to Pantagruel, where
Alcofrybas urges readers to memorize his words
in case “l’art de l’Imprimerie” (the art of print-
ing) should cease, the most important early dis-
cussion of printing in Rabelais’s fiction occurs in
the famous letter from Gargantua to the student

Pantagruel (P 8). Here, in his non-giant per-
sona, Gargantua refers to the progress made in
learning, especially in the ancient languages (a
clear reference to the establishment of the Lec-
teurs royaux in 1530) since the invention of di-
vinely inspired printing, which he contrasts (as
had Erasmus and others) with diabolically in-
spired artillery. In Gargantua, printing shops are
among the places visited during the hero’s “new”
education (G 24), and, significantly, the prisoners
of the Picrocholine War are leniently given no
punishment, other than to work in Gargantua’s
new printing works (G 51).
Rabelais himself was a modest contributor to
humanist learning, working for the Lyonnais
printer Sebastian Gryphius to produce, in 1532,
an edition of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and
the Ars medica of Galen, which was reprinted
twice (NRB 105–107). Complimentary references
to Gryphius occur in his liminary material, both
here and in other works.
If Rabelais was happy with Gryphius for his
humanist output, he was dissatisfied with the fate
of his fictional work, which for ten years contin-
ued to be reprinted on a regular basis, frequently
without his sanction. Notably, satirical references
to the Sorbonne removed from the 1542 editions
of Gargantua and Pantagruel (NRB 12, 23) by
his printer, François Juste, were retained in edi-
tions published by Étienne Dolet, also in 1542
(NRB 13, 24). Whether this contributed to the
condemnation of these works in 1543 is unclear,
but Rabelais was put in a position of some dan-
ger. In his later fictional work he took steps to
protect himself.
Rabelais’s first privilège or Royal Privilege,
which authorized the publication of his works
and provided an early form of copyright protec-
tion, dates from September 19, 1545 [OC 1362–
3]. Prohibiting the publication of editions unau-
thorized by Rabelais, the Royal Privilege issued
by Francis I praises the Gargantua and Panta-
gruel as “no less useful than enjoyable,” but
complains that “the printers corrupted and per-
verted the books in several places.” As a result,
we are told, Rabelais has refrained from publish-
ing a sequel to his earlier bestsellers (“se seroit
abstenu de mectre en public le reste et sequence
des dictz faictz et dictz Heroı̈ques”), despite
strong encouragement by “learned and knowl-
Printing 193
edgeable people” to do so. This royal defense of
works proscribed by the Sorbonne, largely on the
basis of their literary merits, is particularly note-
worthy.
Despite the privilège, and the volume’s dedi-
cation to Marguerite de Navarre, the Third
Book (NRB 28), printed by the humanist Chré-
tien Wechel of Paris, was also banned in Decem-
ber 1546. Shortly thereafter, Rabelais himself
fled France for Metz: ultimately the Royal Priv-
ilege of 1545 protected him neither against the
Sorbonne, nor against pirated editions. Nor was
he on good terms with his new printer. In the
Fourth Book, Rabelais appears to blame Wechel
for a textual blunder in 1546 (OC 520), and there
is evidence of a lawsuit between him and Wechel
in a document of February 27, 1546. Not sur-
prisingly, Rabelais did not employ Wechel for
the definitive editions of the Third and Fourth
Books in 1552.
These (NRB 36, 45–46) definitive editions of
the Third and Fourth Books were published by
Michel Fezandat of Paris and were protected by
an even more remarkable privilège dated August
6, 1550 (343–44). Granted under the aegis of a
powerful protector, Odet de Chastillon, and read-
ing like a humanist manifesto, the new Royal
Privilege repeats many of the terms of 1545. It
also covers Rabelais’s learned works and seeks
to suppress the inauthentic works connected with
Rabelais’s name. Notwithstanding the privilège
authorizing its publication, however, the Fourth
Book was quickly condemned. The king backed
Rabelais in the face of this condemnation, vir-
tually guaranteeing the volume’s succès de scan-
dale, and the Fourth Book was reprinted, first by
Fezandat and then illegally by others, in part to
satisfy public curiosity about the controversy.
Rabelais’s death in 1553 prevented any test of
his reinforced privilège and powerful patronage.
Rabelais was typical of authors of his period:
his views on printers were not uniformly favor-
able, and like other sixteenth-century writers he
could not fully control the output or quality of
his published works. Overall, however, his ref-
erences to printing indicate that he was positively
disposed toward its development, viewing it as a
positive tool for learning and for humankind.
Readings: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press
194 Prognostications
as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ste-
phen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really Know about
Printing and Publishing?” Éditer et traduire Rabelais
à travers les âges, ed. Paul J. Smith (Faux titre; no.
127; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Stephen Rawles and
Michael A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography
[NRB]: Editions of Rabelais before 1626, ER 20 (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1987).
Stephen Rawles
PROGNOSTICATIONS Genre in which Ra-
belais began writing at the same time he under-
took Pantagruel, prompted by the need felt by
Rabelais’s protectors and patrons, the du Bellays,
to counter astrologists writing in favor of
Charles V’s ambition to unite Europe under his
tutelage, Pantagrueline Prognostication gives
voice to reform-minded French Catholics’ sus-
picion of supranational authority and mocks the
“folz astrologues de Lovain” (“the foolish asto-
logers of Louvain” [PP 1.2]), because their
gloom seemed to deny not only the aspirations
of the French crown but the very possibility of
human agency. Pantagrueline Prognostication
also shows much the same combination of evan-
gelical propaganda, delight in learning and scorn
for pedantry, linguistic and literary polyphony,
and popular irreverence and humor verging on
the subversive as Pantagruel, while later Prog-
nostications resemble the surviving Almanachs.
The passage from the du Bellay Mémoires that
helped late twentieth-century scholars understand
the context for the Pantagrueline Prognostica-
tion also serves as pretext for one of the earliest
chapters of the Essais (1.11), in which Mon-
taigne unpacked and scrutinized the du Bellays’
account to cast doubt on historical narration as it
was then being practiced.
Readings: Edward Benson, Money and Magic in
Montaigne: The Historicity of the Essais (Geneva
[THR 295], 1995); Carlo Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo.
Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa
del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Carlo Ginzburg, Ec-
stasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Ray-
mond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991); Pan-
tagrueline Prognostication pour l’an 1533, ed. M. A.
Screech, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1974).
Edward Benson
PROLOGUE, TO PANTAGRUEL The pro-
logue to Pantagruel (1532) is an interpretive
challenge. Some of the questions raised include
the following: For whom was Rabelais writing
this popular, humanist work? What is the nature
and significance of the relationship between the
mock author and narrator, Alcofrybas Nasier,
and the inscribed audience? Why is there an ad-
versarial relationship between Alcofrybas and
some of the addressees? Why does Alcofrybas
spend the greater part of this prologue praising
the Chroniques gargantuines or Gargantuan
Chronicles, a chapbook appearing six months
earlier than Pantagruel, and one that Rabelais
himself most likely did not write? What impor-
tance can one ascribe to the erudite, biblical, and
popular allusions? What kind of role is expected
of the real reader?
Readings of the prologue have included in-
terpretations focusing on playfulness and un-
predictability, on varying degrees of underlying
coherence, or on stylistic, rhetorical, or narrato-
logical aspects of the text. Floyd Gray (1974)
argues that the heterogeneous audience addressed
by Alcofrybas Nasier at the beginning of the pro-
logue (“Tres illustres et tres chevaleureux cham-
pions, gentilz hommes et aultres”) immediately
suggests play, instability, and equivocation. Ray-
mond La Charité (1980) recognizes Rabelais’s
penchant for play and ambiguity. He contends
that Pantagruel as a whole is tied together by
multiple structuring principles, and he views the
prologue as an invitation to readers to be active
and loyal, as we reread the work and reflect on
it “contrastively, obliquely.” Edwin Duval (1991)
points out the well-developed use of the utile
dulci topos in the prologue, which promises in-
struction as well as pleasure, and emphasizes the
importance of the parallel Alcofrybas draws be-
tween the Chroniques Gargantuines and sacred
texts. This parallel is consistent with the overall
coherence of Pantagruel as a Christian humanist
text.
The rhetorical aspect of the text has been
treated by Losse (1980), who analyzes the pro-
logue in the context of rhetorical paradox, and
who sees Rabelais as exploiting the rhetoric of
billingsgate (named for a London fish market re-
nowned for its foul language) and figures of the
more serious epideictic rhetorical tradition. Paul

Smith (1984), who characterizes the prologue as
“a conscientious work, composed according to
the rules of rhetoric” (“un travail conscientieux,
accompli selon les règles de la rhetorique”), ex-
tends the Losse analysis by examining the pro-
logue according to the rules of the dispositio, or
the way speech is ordered and arranged.
In his rhetorical and narratological analysis,
Rigolot (1981) describes the dominating style
(style de domination) of Alcofrybas and sees a
contractual relationship between the narrator
(narrateur) and the reader or narratee (narra-
taire), rendered particularly complex because of
a narrative situation in which the utterance (én-
oncé) is supposed to be true, but at the same time
cannot be true. Rigolot connects the prologue
with other chapters in the text in which the voice
of Alcofrybas can be heard, most notably chap-
ters 17 and 32, and chapter 34, where the narrator
makes a final admission of powerlessness. Con-
nections between the function of Alcofrybas in
the prologue and other chapters of Pantagruel
are also made by Mary Baker (1990), who de-
fines some common and occasionally over-
lapping critical terminology used to describe the
narrative communication situation. She then ex-
amines the situation in the prologue where the
various roles, including those suggested for real
readers, defy simple categorization. Subsequent
intrusions by Alcofrybas in Pantagruel in Chap-
ters 17 and 32 serve as examples of metalepsis,
a narrative transgression occurring here when the
narrator who has stood outside his story becomes
a character in it. In sum, Rabelais starts out play-
ing with narrative norms in the prologue and
keeps on playing in the rest of the book, contin-
ually thwarting reader expectations.
Finally, interesting and useful insights into the
prologue may be found in many book-length
studies too numerous to list here, as well as in
articles that focus on narration, but not primarily
on the prologue. In this latter category see, for
example, Andrea Frisch (1999). As recent criti-
cism indicates, the gateway to Rabelais’s first
book continues to challenge its readers.
Readings: Mary J. Baker, “Narration in Panta-
gruel,” RR 82.3 (May 1990): 312–19; Edwin M. Du-
val, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod
vidimus testamur: Testimony, Narrative Agency and
Prologues, Fourth Book 195
the World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24.3 (1999):
261–83; Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’écriture (Paris: Ni-
zet, 1974); Floyd Gray, “Rabelais’s First Readers,”
Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed.
Raymond C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Fo-
rum Publishers, 1986); Raymond C. La Charite, Rec-
reation, Reflection, and Re-creation: Perspectives on
Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington, KY: French Forum
Publishers, 1980); Deborah N. Losse, Rhetoric at
Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Berne: Peter
Lang, 1980); François Rigolot, “Vraisemblance et nar-
rativité dans le Pantagruel,” EC 21.1 (1981): 53–68;
Paul Smith, “Le prologue du Pantagruel: Une lecture,”
Neophilologus 68.2 (1984): 161–69.
Mary J. Baker
PROLOGUES, FOURTH BOOK The Fourth
Book, if both the incomplete 1548 edition and
the definitive 1552 edition are considered, in-
cludes three liminary texts: the 1548 prologue,
the 1552 prologue, and the Dedicatory Letter to
Odet de Châtillon, published with the 1552 text.
These three texts may profitably be discussed in
relation to one another, particularly with respect
to content and rhetorical strategies.
The 1548 prologue, in its tone and the violence
of its railings against Rabelais’s old enemies, the
Sorbonne and the Parlement de Paris, is remi-
niscent of the narrator of the first three books.
The fictive reader is parodied, burlesqued, and
thanked for the gift of a bottle-breviary bearing
hieroglyphic designs on its outside, a Silenus-
like figure suggestive of hidden meanings and
serious as well as comic intentions that is remi-
niscent of the Gargantua prologue. Some of this
material is retained in the 1552 prologue, such
as the opening address to the “good people”
whom the narrator is unable to see without put-
ting on his spectacles. The fictive reader is lit-
erally envisaged as judge of Rabelais’s Third
Book and of the individuals who have attacked
it. This device attempts to invert hierarchy by
making the implied reader conscious of his own
power to judge the powers established to judge
him. Beneath the banter on the surface is an al-
most conspiratorial complicity between author
and implied reader. Implementing a strategy of
defiance toward his enemies, this prologue also
contains some implicit criticism of royal politics.
Such criticism had to be sacrificed in the 1552
196 Prophecy and Divination
prologue after Rabelais received royal protection.
Rabelais’s strategy in this prologue is to judge
and condemn his critics, darkly hinting at trial
and execution. The Sorbonne and Parlement de
Paris could hardly have found this prologue, the
most violent of all the prologues, inoffensive.
Rabelais dedicated the 1552 edition of the
Fourth Book in a letter addressed to “The Very
Illustrious and Most Reverend Monsignor Odet,
Cardinal de Châtillon.” It was to the cardinal that
Rabelais owed the obtaining of the Royal Privi-
lege, dated August 6, 1550, for a period of ten
years, allowing him to reprint his prior works and
to print new ones. Odet de Châtillon was at the
time a member of Henry II’s Privy Council and
had the responsibility for decisions concerning
censorship or approval of book publication. He
was a prince of the church and a cousin of Mont-
morency, the constable of France, known to be
an enlightened patron and protector of the arts
and of liberal Christian humanists. He was also
the protector of Pierre de Ronsard, who dedi-
cated his poem Hercule Chrestien to the cardinal.
In his Dedicatory Letter, Rabelais acknowl-
edges the support of Châtillon and reserves the
heights of encomiastic rhetoric for the praise of
the cardinal as Gallic Hercules, a figure of Her-
cules as the god of eloquence which was much
in fashion in French humanist circles in the first
decades of the sixteenth century.
The Dedicatory Letter of 1552 makes the same
points as the 1548 prologue—the defense against
accusations of heresy, the analogies between the
comic writer and doctor, the reader and the pa-
tient, the scorn for his accusers—but with a ma-
jor difference in tone. The sharp verbal irony of
the 1548 prologue has been replaced by more
formal rhetoric, full of praise and deference, in
which Rabelais invokes the protection of highly
placed and powerful admirers. The inflammatory
bravado of the 1548 prologue is tempered, even
when Rabelais reuses material from the 1548
text. The vestimentary anecdote he tells near the
conclusion of the Dedicatory Letter is a metaphor
for, and a clue to, Rabelais’s new strategy of con-
cealment by aesthetic, stylistic, or ironic distance.
The 1552 prologue displays a new tone some-
where between the sarcasm of the 1548 prologue
and the official pieties of the Dedicatory Letter
to Odet de Châtillon. It is typically interpreted as
an expression of the principle of moderation.
Yet even as the prologue passes from the theme
of health to the themes of prayer and moderation
(mediocrité) in the extended exemplum of Couil-
latris—itself fraught with ambiguities—the
Olympian setting of the tale defines an ambigu-
ous mythical and mimetic space, permitting Ra-
belais to comment obliquely on topical contem-
porary controversies and political events.
Thus, the violence of tone and the Silenic am-
bivalence of the 1548 prologue were replaced in
1552 by two discourses functioning in an intra-
textual dialectic. The 1552 prologue and the
Dedicatory Epistle constitute one larger liminary
text presenting two quite different attitudes and
tones that both complement and undermine one
another. The letter invokes worldly power and
eminence in the grand, rhetorical style; the pro-
logue invokes in comic style the humble gout-
teux, or people afflicted with gout, in their mod-
est, limited hope for life and health. The
empirical reader of the two texts should not be
duped either by the exaggerated pieties of the
Epistle or by the humble morality of the pro-
logue. They constitute a disjunctive, oblique dis-
course whose ironies (i.e., contradictions and in-
compatibilities) reveal in the text a space
between the writer’s place in a social hierarchy
dependent on an ideology and a discourse of
power, and his independence and distancing
from that ideology and its rhetoric.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva:
Droz, 1998); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mytholo-
gies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1996); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival:
Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1990); Camilla J. Nilles, “Reading the
Ancien Prologue,” ER 29 (Geneva: Droz, 1993); Je-
rome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology: Structures of Sub-
version in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1990) Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press) 1979.
Jerome Schwartz
PROPHECY AND DIVINATION Prophecy
plays a key role in the major narrative works of
the European Renaissance. For those epics de-
scended from the Aeneid, prophecy serves as an
instrument of teleology and as a legitimation of

the ruling dynasty. Epic prophecy wards off di-
gression and ensures an orderly resolution of the
plot. Since Rabelais does not write dynastic ep-
ics, he has no use for the conventional motif of
genealogical prophecy. Nevertheless, his work
abounds in portents and prodigies, apocalyptic
signs and divinatory rituals, and eager inquiries
into an enigmatic future.
In Pantagruel, the hero’s birth is accompa-
nied by a burlesque array of astrological portents
of the sort that Rabelais enjoys parodying in his
own almanacs and prognostications. The very
name Pantagruel, interpreted to mean “all
thirsty,” is taken as a prophecy of his eventual
victory over the Dipsodes, or the Thirsty Ones.
Epistémon’s death and resurrection in chapter 30
parody the epic motif of the descent to the un-
derworld where the hero receives a prophetic vi-
sion intended to spur him on to fulfill his destiny.
To this epic theme of destiny, Rabelais opposes
the comic theme of pastime, which has no pre-
scribed course or goal. Pantagruel ends with a
promise of numerous unwritten sequels that
strangely anticipate the end of the first part of
Don Quijote, which announces the voyage of the
hero to Saragossa, where he never arrives.
Gargantua closes with an Enigmatic Proph-
ecy that provokes a conflict of interpretation be-
tween Gargantua and Frère Jean. This episode
accurately foretells the course of the remaining
books, where the itinerant heroes repeatedly dis-
agree over the interpretation of signs. In the
Third Book, Panurge seemingly consults every
type of divination known to antiquity and the
Renaissance in order to satisfy his curiosity about
his marital prospects. As a result, the Third Book
resembles a vast compendium of divinatory tech-
niques in the tradition of Cicero’s On Divination
(De divinatione), and Panurge’s pursuit of the fu-
ture turns into a commentary on Cicero and his
Renaissance interpreters. In this respect, the
Third Book defines prophecy as an exercise in
reading.
In the Fourth Book, prophecy emerges as a
central preoccupation in the episode of the Ma-
creons, modeled on Plutarch’s discussion of the
decline of oracles. When Macrobe suggests that
the storm that has carried the travelers to his
island portended the death of a local hero or
demigod, Pantagruel responds with a lengthy and
Propos des Bien Yvres, Les 197
learned disquisition on portents, prodigies, and
other “precedent signs,” which announce the
death of prominent figures and the upheaval of
human affairs. Although Macrobe cannot show
the travelers where they are going, since their
indeterminate and aimless voyage resists any ef-
fort of prognosis, the episode of the Macreons
does offer important insight into the prevalence
of prophecy in a society beset by the pressures
of novelty and change. New inventions, new in-
vasions, new religions, and all the epochal
changes experienced by Rabelais’s contemporar-
ies encouraged an acute sensitivity to prophetic
signs and omens, for which abundant testimony
is available from prognosticators and historians
alike. In this way, prophecy becomes a sign of
the times in Rabelais’s work.
The understanding of prophecy in Rabelais en-
gages the larger question of how to understand
the episodic structure of his work. Recently,
there has emerged in Rabelais criticism a contro-
versy between the architectural reading and the
topographic reading of narrative design. Where
the architectural reading recognizes a perfectly
linear, powerfully teleological narrative whose
origin prophesies its end, the topographic reading
discerns a series of discrete episodes whose spo-
radic connection resists the type of overview or
synoptic vision claimed by prophecy. Many
years ago a prominent critic observed that divi-
nation can only have meaning in an ordered
world, and Rabelais’s world is ordered. This
opinion exemplifies the function of prophecy in
Rabelais’s work. Prophecy reveals the precon-
ceptions that we bring to the text and shows
whether we conceive of reading as the search for
order or the recognition of contingency.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges.
L’insolite au 16e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Edwin
Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Ha-
ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Laurent Gos-
selin, “Rabelais, une ontologie de la contingence,” Ca-
hiers Textuels 34/44 4–5 (1989): 33–41; Michael
Screech, “Some Stoic Elements in Rabelais’ Religious
Thought,” ER 1 (1956): 73–99.
Eric MacPhail
PROPOS DES BIEN YVRES, LES (G 5)
The fifth chapter of Gargantua, “Les Propos des
bien yvres,” records the inspired and giddy conver-
198 Propos des Bien Yvres, Les
sations of more than a dozen tipplers feting the
imminent birth of the book’s eponymous hero. It
might be called a textual madrigal and a poly-
logue. The term madrigal is applicable because
the voices originate from different levels of the
social scale—included are clerics, jokers, a
tavern-keeper, a baud and a butcher, locals from
Devinière, a doctor, all gifted punsters—and are
set in rhythms of crescendo, syncopation, and
sustained harmony. Music of call-and-response,
a mode of “sounding,” causes voiced questions
to be answered by collective and individual ex-
clamation. The text might be called a polylogue
for reason of its free, indirect discourse. The
voices float indiscriminately, speaking in both
unison and isolation, as thought and as speech,
without cumbrous attributions in the order of “he
said” or “she said.” The episode turns into a con-
vivium, a banquet, in which stereophony—
voices heard at one end of the gathering in visual
and vocal counterpoint to those at others—pre-
vails.
Michael A. Screech once said that, with a few
footnotes marking who is saying what and when,
a reader might make sense of the revelry. At
stake is a production of non-sense, in which per-
formance becomes meaning. The text recounts
the speech of a ritual communion in which, for
the duration of the event, social contradictions
are suspended. The words amount to noise, what
in traditional societies was administered to ad-
vance or retard cosmic events or to regulate the
rhythms of nature that might be out of joint or
synchrony (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 343–345). In the
mobile architecture of Gargantua, the drinkers’
inspired cacophony prompts Gargamelle (who
in chapter 4, pregnant with child for eleven
months, had just eaten a pile of rotten tripe: “O
wondrous fecal matter that was swelling up in
her!” [12]) to begin the muscular contractions
that push the fetus along the canal of her left ear
and into the world (G 6).
The propos are an intermediate and vital mo-
ment in the generation of Gargantua, causing it,
too, to dilate and give birth to itself. After the
narrator notes that the drinkers went pell-mell
to the willow grove to gather together, “[t]hen
flagons went about, hams trotted, goblets flew,
glasses tinkled and chimed” (12). In the body of
the text, causality and procreation are conflated.
“What came first, thirst or drinking?” Antitheti-
cal answers are proposed when a chiasm makes
the one the cause and effect of the other: “For
me it’s an eternity of drinking, and a drinking of
eternity.” Words and speech are born, as will be
Gargantua, out of the substance of print. Chan-
tons, beuvons; un motet entonnons. Où est mon
entonnoir? [Let’s sing, let’s drink; let’s intone a
motet. Where’s my funnel?]: a motet (literally a
“word [mot] and [et]”) begins to intone, and in-
tonation (“etonnons”) gives rise to a funnel,
which figures both as an object thrust in the cel-
ebrants’ mouths and as a megaphone their lips
purse when they sing their words (mots) to the
world.
Lusty humor marks their puns, and so does
cosmic vision (“God the great made the planets
[planètes] and we the clean plates [platz netz]”)
and delight of inebriate vision (“O lacryma
Christi!” [14]). A silent reading yields embedded
relations. Bien yvres is the anagram of breviaire,
a divine breviary that resembles beuverie,
roughly, the “boozers’ colloquy.” The bad tripe
that Gargamelle swallowed led to the wit or es-
prit of the propos. Sacred and popular worlds are
of the same order. The ivres celebrate their emer-
gence from winter (hiver), the season of privation
(from the verb priver), as they utter graphic jokes
and allusive figures—spoonerisms, visual puns,
obscene conundrums—in a bookish space that
knows no season. In the midst of joy and revelry
there are also anticipation and disquiet. The pro-
pos are of a textual wealth and complexity that
inspire a great deal of modern writing.
Reading: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques 1: Le
cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1962).
Tom Conley
 Q
QUARESMEPRENANT A monstrous figure
described in Rabelais’s Fourth Book and also
known as King Lent. Characterized by austerity,
lethargy, and impassivity, this perplexing char-
acter functions, in part, as an allegory of Lent.
While the name “Quaresme,” or Carême, desig-
nates “Lent,” the period of nonindulgence be-
tween Carnival and Easter, despite many ambiv-
alences, the combination Quaresmeprenant has
been widely identified with Mardi Gras. Embed-
ded between the physetere and Andouilles epi-
sodes, Quaresmeprenant constitutes part of
Rabelais’s satires of religious extremes. The half-
giant is described in four chapters of the Fourth
Book (4BK 29–32) by Pantagruel’s comrade
Xenomanes who, upon invitation, offers a se-
quence of six appreciations concerning the phys-
ical attributes and demeanor of this bewildering
character. Included in those depictions are Quar-
esmeprenant’s garments, nourishment, pastimes,
and behavior (4BK 29); lists of seventy-eight in-
ternal and sixty-four external body parts (4BK
30–31); and an itemization of thirty-six expres-
sions related to his comportment, including some
rather singular physical features concerning his
composure (4BK 32). Xenomanes’s statements
regarding Quaresmeprenant encompass both an-
atomical or medical panoramas and include rhe-
torical components.
Medically speaking, this freakish character
possesses an exceedingly peculiar anatomy.
While Rabelais’s “grotesquely real” approach to
the internal anatomical dimensions of Quares-
meprenant provides evidence that he conformed
to common practice in sixteenth-century public
dissection, scholars have supplied abundant ar-
gument that Rabelais was playfully making fun
of certain controversial aspects of sixteenth-
century medicine, such as Galen’s erroneous at-
tribution of seven ribs to the human anatomy,
which was based only on his dissection of a mon-
key. With respect to accounts of Quaresmepren-
ant’s external anatomy, while suggesting medical
accuracy, the Rabelaisian text offers a confused,
topsy-turvy format reversing the medically ac-
cepted order of the sixteenth-century dissection.
Rather than beginning with the customary head
to toes order of the sixteenth-century anatomical
dissection, Rabelais moves from the toes to the
head, employing a commentary that perhaps re-
inforces the unnaturalness of this being.
Some scholars contend that Quaresmepren-
ant’s description embraces a number of elements
from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a prominent
sixteenth-century rhetorical manual attributed to
Cicero. Quaresmeprenant’s physical description
(4BK 29–31) seems to conform to effictio (rep-
resenting bodily form), whereas the account of
his comportment (4BK 32) belongs to the notatio
(describing a person’s character). Lastly, eviden-
tia (the imaginative power of the description of
an object), a third concept of classical rhetoric,
appears to be used by Rabelais in describing
Quaresmeprenant. Even though rhetorical ele-
ments used in Rabelais’s treatment of Quares-
meprenant may have been inspired by contem-
porary rhetorical handbooks, above all the
Rabelaisian text utilized those elements in a com-
ically corrupted form. Throughout the chapters
describing Quaresmeprenant, it is obvious that,
despite all attempts to describe him, Quaresme-
prenant remains enigmatic; the reader is simply
unable to visualize this being. Some scholars
contend that, rather that attempt to visualize the
anatomy of this delusory character, his descrip-
tion should be read “metadiscursively” as enter-
taining considerations of the possibilities and im-
possibilities of either anatomical or rhetorical
description.
Readings: Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, “Quaresme-
200 Queneau, Raymond
prenant: l’image littéraire et la contestation de
l’analogie médicale,” Rabelais in Glasgow, ed. J. Co-
leman and C. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow, 1984); Sam-
uel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Meta-
text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
Paul J. Smith, “Dissecting Quaresmeprenant—Rabe-
lais’ Representation of the Human Body: A Rhetorical
Approach,” Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with
the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture,
ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Burling-
ton, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel
Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Macmillan,
1993).
Karen Sorsby
QUENEAU, RAYMOND Twentieth-century
French poet and novelist whose wordplay and
verbal experimentation offer strong affinities
with the work of Rabelais. Queneau’s most Rab-
elaisian work is his 1965 novel Les Fleurs
bleues, whose intricate pattern of allusions to Ra-
belais has attracted much critical attention. More
generally, Queneau’s work exemplifies the So-
viet critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight, founded
largely on a reading of Rabelais, that language
is the hero of the novel. In this respect, Que-
neau’s vertiginous Exercices de style, which of-
fers ninety-nine versions of the same banal in-
cident, is a paradigm of the novel, where plot is
cruelly subordinate to style. Indeed, Queneau
may have rediscovered what Leo Spitzer identi-
fied as Rabelais’s principle of the gratuitous plot.
The essays and interviews collected in the
1950 volume Sticks, Figures, and Letters (Bâ-
tons, chiffres et letters) provide another clue to
the literary affinities of Queneau and Rabelais. In
these journalistic or occasional pieces, especially
those collected under the heading of Preliminar-
ies, Queneau repeatedly addresses the widening
gap between written and spoken language and
champions what he calls neo-French, or the spo-
ken language as a medium of literary expression.
In his effort to promote spoken French to the
status of a literary language, he draws a frequent
parallel between himself and Renaissance cham-
pions of the vernacular, such as Rabelais and
Montaigne. For Queneau, spoken French stands
in relation to the literary French of his own time
as the vernacular did to Latin in Rabelais’s time.
Extrapolating from some of the allusions to Pan-
tagruel in Les fleurs bleues, we might say that
Queneau regarded contemporary French authors
as so many Ecoliers Limousins, devoted to the
perpetuation of an unnatural and archaic idiom.
At the same time, Queneau was deeply sen-
sitive to the capacity of language to defy the
linear progress of time and history. The dual
protagonists of Les fleurs bleues—the medieval
Duc d’Auge and the modern Cidrolin—often
exchange vocabulary so that medieval or pseudo-
medieval phrases reappear in a modern context,
while conspicuously modern words frequently in-
trude in medieval conversation. Anachronism
thus represents not only a problem but also a
structure and even a resource of language. Que-
neau also enjoys playing with etymologies and
coining improbable neologisms in the same spirit
as Rabelais. Queneau’s fictional onomastics ex-
plore the implications of cratylism in a way that
may remind us of the discussion of the propriety
of names in the Fourth Book (4BK 37). In all
these ways, Queneau’s work offers a fascinating
meditation on many of the essential problems of
time and language raised by Rabelais’s fictional
narratives.
Readings: Noël Arnaud, “Encyclopédie et encyclo-
pédisme chez Rabelais et chez Queneau,” Raymond
Queneau encyclopédiste? (Limoges, 1990); Dorothy
Gabe Coleman, “Polyphonic Poets: Rabelais and Que-
neau,” Words of Power (Glasgow, 1987); Marie-Luce
Demonet, “Un philosophe des langues,” Magazine lit-
téraire 319 (1994): 42–45; Monique Manopoulos,
“Carnavalesque et tiers-espace chez Rabelais et Que-
neau,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1994).
Eric MacPhail
QUINTILIAN First-century Roman rhetori-
cian and educationalist whose twelve books of
Institutiones oratoriae were very popular during
the Renaissance. After the discovery of the com-
plete manuscript in 1416, it was studied by Ital-
ian humanists like Lorenzo Valla, and the editio
princeps was published in Rome in 1470. In
France many editions and commentaries were is-
sued in the 1530s and 1540s (Pierre Galland,
1538; several other editions; and Peter Ramus’s
commentary, 1549). Quintilian appealed to the
humanists not just as a theorist of rhetoric but
also as a grammarian concerned with language
and literature. He was a stylist advocating the use

of more models than just Cicero in the process
of creative writing, a moralist who defined the
perfect orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus (a
good man skilled at speaking), and one whose
theories of education embraced the encyclopedia
of learning and followed the development of the
whole man from childhood to maturity.
Rabelais mentions Quintilian only twice: in
Gargantua’s letter to his son about education
(P 8), he recommends starting the study of lan-
guages with Greek “comme le veult Quintilien”
(“as Quintilian wishes”), and he includes him
among several authors of good latinity (P 10),
although Pantagruel’s Latin is to be based pri-
Quintilian 201
marily on Cicero. Quintilian’s influence is also
seen in Rabelais’s many speeches and letters
within the fiction, in his comic encomia, in set
rhetorical themes, and in the emphasis on ges-
ture. It is often not possible to distinguish be-
tween the influence of Cicero and that of Quin-
tilian, but it is the “colors of Ciceronian rhetoric”
(“couleurs de rhetorique ciceronienne”) which
dominate.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text
(Oxford, 1979); Guy Demerson, “Tradition rhétorique
et création littéraire chez Rabelais,” Humanisme et fa-
cétie (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994).
Peter Sharratt
 R
RAMINAGROBIS (3BK 21–23) In his quest
to decide whether or not he should marry, Pan-
urge goes with Pantagruel to Villaumère (Ville
au Maire) to consult Raminagrobis, an old poet
who is close to death and is thus supposed to
have the gift of prophecy. We learn that Ram-
inagrobis’s second wife “was the magnificent
Pock-face, who gave birth to the beautiful Ba-
zoche” (“en secondes nopces espousa la Grande
Guorre, dont nasquit la belle Bazosche” [GP 298;
3BK 21]), and that Panurge offers him a gold
ring set with a sapphire, as well as a white cock.
The full force of these allusions has not been
satisfactorily explained. In reply to Panurge’s
question, Raminagrobis writes out a rondeau
with the refrain, “Maybe you’ll take her, maybe
you won’t” (“Prenez la, ne la prenez pas” [GP
298; 3BK 21]), which contains a series of con-
tradictory injunctions with erotic undertones.
Raminagrobis asks them to leave so that he can
die in peace. That very day, he has already
chased out of his house “a whole horde of vil-
lainous creatures, foul and filthy beasts, a dis-
gusting motley, monkish crowd, in black and
brown and white and gray” (“un tas de villaines,
immondes et pestilentes bestes, noires, guarres,
fauves, blanches, cendrées, grivolées” [GP 299;
3BK 21]), which Panurge identifies with the
mendicant friars and other monks with their dis-
tinctive habits. As a result, he considers Ramin-
agrobis a heretic.
The author of the poem was the Rhétoriqueur
Guillaume Crétin (although it is Rabelais who
repeats the whole line as the refrain, not just the
first two words) and earlier critics followed
Etienne Pasquier in identifying Raminagrobis
with him. Later, and especially since the appear-
ance of Abel Lefranc’s Oeuvres de François Ra-
belais, it became customary to identify him with
Jean Lemaire de Belges, of La Ville-au-Maire,
who in chapter 30 is said to be showing off
(“faire du grobis”) and who speaks copiously of
“La Grande Guorre.” Rabelais could also have
had in mind the name of Ramus, a controversial
public figure in Paris from 1543 onward (Sharratt
1982). Rabelais’s description—“sophist, quib-
bler, hair-splitter, and fool”—admirably fits Ra-
mus’s public persona; he was already suspected
of being a Lutheran, as a logician he dealt in
disjunctives, and the darkness of his skin earned
him the nickname “Marrabecus,” which corre-
sponds to the description of Raminagrobis as
“marrabais or Marrano (a Christianized Jew or
Moor).” The name of Guillaume du Bellay,
seigneur de Langey, has also been associated
with Raminagrobis because of the exemplary se-
renity of his death in 1543, and parallels have
been made with Erasmus’s Funus (The Funeral)
and the sickbed scene in Farce de Maistre Path-
elin. Duval has stressed the central role of Ram-
inagrobis among the authorities consulted and the
various forms of divination, linking the incident
with that of the Dive Bouteille.
The name Raminagrobis, which existed before
Rabelais and also appears later (for example, in
La Fontaine), means “a large cat” and is thus
associated with divination. Its primary connota-
tions, however, are of hypocrisy which Rabelais
underlines in the Pantagrueline Prognostication
of 1533. As Duval suggests, Raminagrobis is act-
ing a role. Identification and even allusion may
contribute to an understanding of these chapters,
but the true function of this open-ended incident
is to be found in the apparent digressions and the
ambivalent position of both Raminagrobis and
Panurge.
Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-
lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997);
Edwin M. Duval, “De la dive bouteille à la quête du
Tiers Livre,” Rabelais pour le XXIe siècle, ed. Michel

Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Peter Sharratt, “Ra-
belais, Ramus and Raminagrobis,” RHLF 82 (1982):
263–69; André Tournon, “En sens agile”: les acro-
baties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion,
1995).
Peter Sharratt
RAMUS, PETER (1515–72) Peter Ramus
(Pierre de La Ramée), philosopher, teacher and
educationalist, who set about the reorganization
of the seven arts of the encyclopedia, based on a
new theory of method. Ramus propounded a hu-
manist, rhetorically orientated reform of logic
based on a tendentious rejection of Aristotle; his
Dialecticae partitiones and Aristotelicae Ani-
madversiones of 1543 formed the basis of many
reeditions and reworkings in Latin, with one im-
portant French edition (La Dialectique, 1555).
After being banned from teaching philosophy be-
cause of such subversiveness, he turned first to
the study of rhetoric in association with his col-
league Talaeus (Omer Talon), indulging in a sim-
ilar attack on Cicero (Brutinae Quaestiones,
1547) and Quintilian (Rhetoricae Distinctiones
in Quintilianum, 1549), and then to further works
on mathematics, ethics, and theology.
Ramus and Rabelais had much in common: a
hatred of scholasticism, a belief in the value of
learning, an encyclopedic range and a desire for
pedagogic reform. There is no record, however,
of personal contact. Rabelais’s first two books
appeared while Ramus was still a student at the
Collège de Navarre in Paris. By the time of the
Third Book, Ramus was a public figure and the
best-known logician in Paris, and Defaux has ar-
gued that his works on logic, with their emphasis
on the supremacy of reason, are a direct source
of inspiration of this book. He may also be al-
luded to in the multi-faceted “maı̂tre Ramina-
grobis.” In 1551 he published his Pro philoso-
phica Parisiensis academiae disciplina oratio,
defending his own pedagogical practice of teach-
ing philosophy and literature together in a short-
ened arts-course, and was appointed Professor of
Philosophy and Eloquence at the Collège Royal.
His colleague Pierre Galland replied in his Pro
schola Parisiensi contra novam academiam Petri
Rami oratio, showing his disapproval both of this
appointment and of what he saw as Ramus’s cha-
otically poetic approach to learning, likening his
Reading, Portrayal of 203
works to “the vernacular books of the ridiculous
Pantagruel.” Rabelais was provoked to respond
and in the second prologue to the Fourth Book
ridiculed them both. In a digression from the
story of Aesop’s woodman (here, Couillatris),
Jupiter asks what is to be done with both profes-
sors and their hangers-on and partisans who are
disturbing the whole university. Galland is a fox
and Ramus a dog “mesdisant, mesescrivant et
abayant contre les antiques philosophes et ora-
teurs (slandering, libeling, and howling at the an-
cient philosophers and orators).” Together they
are responsible for “feu de faction, simulte, sec-
tes couillonniques et partialité” (“the fire of fac-
tionalism, enmity, ballocky sects, and divisive-
ness”), an early reference to Ramism and the
Ramist controversies. Jupiter cannot decide be-
tween them, and Priapus suggests that these two
self-seeking Peters should be immortalized by
petrification. Rabelais, too, reserves judgment,
siding neither with the Aristotelian nor the Pla-
tonist; a playful juggler with logic himself, he is
not concerned with the debate on method which
was then in vogue and is interested only in the
comic possibilities of the public, controversial
figure and his reputation. For Duval this incident
has an “emblematic function” in the structure of
the Fourth Book, its irreconcilable antagonism
being typical of all such conflicts in this book
and even beyond.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du
rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua,
Le Quart Livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Du-
val, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Panta-
gruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The De-
sign of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva:
Droz, 1998); Kees Meerhoff, Rhétorique et poétique
au XVIe siècle en France: Du Bellay, Ramus et les
autres (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986); Peter Sharratt, “Ra-
mus 2000,” Rhetorica 18 (2000): 399–455.
Peter Sharratt
READING, PORTRAYAL OF Reading in
Rabelais is a complex topic, in part because the
author of the Chroniques lived during the period
of transition from medieval manuscript to early-
modern print, described forty years ago by Mar-
shall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy (1962:
149). The first two books, Pantagruel (1532) and
Gargantua (1534), are filled with discussions of
204 Reading, Portrayal of
reading to and by characters, as well as saluta-
tions, exhortations, and asides to Rabelais’s own
readers by the fictional narrator, Alcofrybas.
Educational reading or studying is found in the
first two books. Frequently, the author links the
two verbs “estudier” and “profiter”: some study
yields profit, while some does not. Although
Pantagruel more often shows the title character
profiting or benefiting from his intellectual en-
deavors, Gargantua is more skeptical about the
benefits of study, particularly at the earlier
“Gothic” time described there.
The famous letter from Gargantua to his son
in chapter 8 of Pantagruel stresses the positive
benefit to be derived from educational reading or
studying and focuses on the importance of imi-
tating teachers and other learned role models. But
the early chapters of Gargantua (14, 15, 21)
show the lack of profit associated with passive
medieval reading, and particularly the habit of
being read to. Surprisingly, at the very end of the
book, in the Abbey of Thélème, which might be
viewed as an ideal educational establishment,
there is very little discussion of reading, and the
study of Latin and Greek seems to have disap-
peared. Frère Jean mocks those monks who
spend their lives in study and reading (52, 56,
57).
A second aspect of reading in Rabelais is ad-
vised by Alcofrybas (the narrator) on how to
read his book. Frequently, this description of
reading is grounded in the pedagogy of the works
themselves. The prologue to Pantagruel advises
the reader to believe whatever he or she reads
there and not to challenge the author. This is a
didactic view of the writer/reader relationship,
typical of the ideas on education expressed in
Rabelais’s first book. Closely related to this di-
dactic view of reading, which outlines a passive
role for the reader, are the analogy in the pro-
logue between reading and medical cure (for
toothache, childbirth); and the emphasis on belief
by the reader, with comparisons between reading
the Chroniques and reading the Bible. In 1532,
Rabelais appears skeptical about the value of ac-
tive, interpretive reading (see the “Conclusion,”
P 34, with its advice to be a good Pantagrueliste).
The prologue to Gargantua, however, with its
famous “turning point,” provides a much more
complex picture of the reading process and al-
ternates between reader-centered and author-
centered views of reading. Although the Sileni
and marrowbone analogies imply that the reader
should simply locate meanings that the author
has placed there, the discussions of Homer and
Ovid suggest, and then reject, the idea that the
reader himself may create meaning in the text.
Finally, the very end of Gargantua (G 58), with
its interpretation of the “Enigme” or Enigmatic
Prophecy, provides two opposing views of read-
ing. While Gargantua looks for a religious inter-
pretation, Frère Jean compares the reading proc-
ess to a tennis game, in which the players shift
sides, as the equilibrium between reader and
writer is maintained, although the adversarial but
playful relationship never completely disappears.
The truce between reader and writer reached
at the end of Gargantua is broken in the Third
Book, with its abandonment of certainty of in-
terpretation; and again, more seriously, in the
Fourth Book with, for example, its attacks on
the Decretals and the oppressive way in which
they and other holy books are used (4BK 49, 51–
53).
Although Rabelais at times approaches a
“reader-centered” view of the reading process, he
is not able to come to a two-way communication-
based model for reading, at least in Pantagruel
and Gargantua. He sees scriptural, evangelical
reading as the model for “good” reading, and
thus he still offers an author-centered, medieval
hermeneutic. Most reading in the first half of the
sixteenth century would still have been of man-
uscripts or of early books printed in the “Gothic”
style (like the early editions of Pantagrue1 and
Gargantua themselves).
Rabelais’s view of writing, however, comes
closer to a modern, language- and text-centered
view of communication and implies a more ac-
tive role for his own readers. Here we see Ra-
belais’s exploitation of the typographic book, ref-
erences to printing, and use of visual style
(Rawles 1997: 9). The tension between descrip-
tions of reading and of writing in Rabelais’s
work shows him to be a transitional figure in
early modern views of communication, as Mar-
shall McLuhan demonstrated forty years ago. But
in addition, recent attention to reading by schol-
ars of print, publication, and the physical book
gives a more concrete meaning to the subject of

reading in Rabelais and suggests a new direction
for research by Rabelais scholars.
Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “ ‘Une descrip-
tion du jeu de paulme soubz obscures parolles’: The
Portrayal of Reading in Pantagruel and Gargantua,”
ER 22 (1988): 57–76; Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “From
‘estudier et profiter’ to ‘instruire et plaire’: Didacti-
cism in Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua,” MLS
19.1 (1989): 37–49; Barry Lydgate, “Printing, Narra-
tive and the Genesis of the Rabelaisian Novel,” RR
71.4 (1980): 345–73; Marshall McLuhan, The Guten-
berg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1962); Stephen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really
Know about Printing and Publishing?” Editer et trad-
uire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. Paul J. Smith
(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi [Faux Titre], 1997).
Cathleen M. Bauschatz
RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE IN
FRANCE The great number of editions of Ra-
belais’s fictional works (the New Rabelais Bib-
liography lists ninety-three editions published in
or before 1626) indicates that he was widely read
in the sixteenth century. As is demonstrated by
Marcel De Grève, Rabelais’s influence on his
contemporaries was profound, varied, and im-
mediate. His works figured on Indexes from
1549 on. Vehement accusations of heresy and
lucianism (imitation of Lucian associated with
freethinking and even atheism by detractors)
came from Catholic authors like Gabriel Du Puy-
Herbaut, François Le Picart, and Guillaume Pos-
tel as well as from Protestant circles (Calvin, On
Scandals, 1550). Rabelais riposted to them in his
novels, especially in his Fourth Book. In the Old
Prologue of 1548, talking about a drunken mag-
pie, called “la pie de Behuart,” he made a pun
on the names of Le Picart and Du Puy-Herbaut,
while elsewhere in the Fourth Book he placed
adversaries among the monstrous progeniture of
Antiphysie (Anti-Nature): “the maniacal Pistols
[Postel], the demoniacal Calvins, impostors of
Geneva, the rabid Putherbeuses [Du Puy-
Herbaut]” (ch. 32). Some imitations like François
Habert’s Songe de Pantagruel (1542) and the
anonymous, so-called para-rabelaisian editions
(the Disciple de Pantagruel, 1538, the fictitious
Fifth Book, 1549) are essential for Rabelais’s fic-
tion because he reacted to them by rewriting them.
Among his sixteenth-century readers we find
Reception and Influence in France 205
authors as diverse as Pierre de Ronsard, young
Theodore Beza, whose macaronic Passavant
(1553) is full of Rabelaisian reminiscences, the
Protestant Henri Estienne, who rejected his ideas
but admired his style, Guillaume Bouchet, and
Montaigne, whose qualification “livres simple-
ment plaisans” is mitigated. Narratives by Noël
du Fail, Barthélemy Aneau (Alector, 1560), Ni-
colas de Cholières, Guillaume des Autelz, Bé-
roalde de Verville (Le Moyen de parvenir, 1610),
and Nicolas Horry (Rabelais ressuscité, 1611)
are all influenced by Rabelais. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Rabelais’s vehement,
grotesque style was much imitated in satirical,
mostly Protestant writing like the anonymous Sa-
tyre ménippée (1593) and in works by Agrippa
d’Aubigné and Marnix de Saint-Aldegonde. The
virulent Rabelais reformé (1619) by the Jesuit
François Garasse attacked the Protestant Pierre
Du Moulin violently by relegating him to the de-
testable followers of Rabelais. François Desprez
composed his Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel
(1565), a strange and influential book without
words, illustrated with grotesque gravures, which
seem to be more inspired by Hieronymus Bosch
and Pieter Bruegel than by Rabelais. Moreover,
there rapidly was born a legend around Rabelais
as a rogue and a jester: like Françis Villon and
Clément Marot, he increasingly became a pop-
ular figure in numerous early modern collections
of anecdotes and jokes.
From the 1620s on, Rabelais’s characters were
often staged in royal masquerades (Naissance de
Pantagruel, 1622), ballets (Ballet des andouilles
[1628], Boufonnerie rabelésique [1638]) and
other festivities. Rabelais continued to be read
and admired by libertine authors like Gassendi,
Naudé, Guy Patin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Saint-
Amant, and Scarron. However, the age of clas-
sicism tended to disapprove of Rabelais’s extrav-
agances, as is seen in the statement of La
Bruyère: “a monstrous assemblage of a delicate
and ingenious morality and a filthy corruption.”
But for the great authors of classicism, Rabelais
is simply unavoidable: La Fontaine’s Fables and
Contes are full of Rabelaisian borrowings, Mo-
lière quotes him in his comedies, and Racine al-
ludes to him in his only comedy Les Plaideurs
(1668). The seventeenth century marked the be-
ginning of a linguistic interest in the language of
206 Reformation
Rabelais, as is visible in Randle Cotgrave’s
French-English Dictionary (1611) and the lexical
works by Gilles Ménage and Furetière. This in-
terest goes with the great editions of Rabelais’s
works, published in Amsterdam, meant for the
French market: the first attempt, including a lex-
ical commentary and a life of Rabelais, was is-
sued by the Elzevier printing house (1663, sev-
eral [pirated] re-editions), which in 1711 was to
be followed by the monumental Amsterdam edi-
tion in five tomes by the French fugitive Jacob
Le Duchat.
Rabelais continued to be read in the Age of
Enlightenment by authors as varied as Beaumar-
chais, Diderot, André Chénier, and of course
Voltaire, although his famous judgment remains
strongly influenced by classicist ideas on biensé-
ance: “It is sorry that a man who has so much
wit made so miserable a use of it.” This preoc-
cupation with bienséance is especially visible
from the numerous editions of Rabelais in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being
“abridged, disciplined, bowdlerised, purged, an-
thologized, all in the name of decency, and under
such labels as Le Rabelais moderne, Le Rabelais
populaire or Le Rabelais classique” (Richard
Cooper). André Gréty’s opéra-comique entitled
Panurge dans l’Ile des Lanternes (1785) had an
enormous success: 248 representations at the
Opera in Paris until 1824.
In the age of Romanticism, Rabelais became,
with Shakespeare and Cervantes, icons of lit-
erary genius: Chateaubriand, Hugo, Michelet,
Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, and Gautier all admired
him. Balzac’s Contes drolatiques have a strong
Rabelaisian flavor; Flaubert read Rabelais while
composing his Madame Bovary; and in his illus-
trations of Rabelais’s works, Gustave Doré ex-
pressed his gloomy Gothic vision of Rabelais.
In the twentieth century, Rabelais continues to
symbolize creative liberty, although for the nov-
elist Louis-Ferdinand Céline Rabelais did not go
far enough (“Rabelais, il a raté son coup”).
Among his adepts are Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi,
1896), Michel de Ghelderode (Pantagleize,
1930), Georges Perec (La vie mode d’emploi,
1978), and Valère Novarina. Jean-Louis Barrault
staged him in a speech-making spectacle, which
coincided with the student protests of May 1968,
followed by representations in New York. Bar-
rault’s total theater gave new impulses to Rabe-
lais’s life on stage. The nouveau romancier
Michel Butor wrote some influential critical es-
says on Rabelais (Rabelais ou c’était pour rire,
1972). Another Minuit-novelist, François Bon,
edited his works, wrote an essay (La folie Ra-
belais, 1992), and worked allusions to Rabelais
into his novels. Michel Radon wrote a biograph-
ical novel on Rabelais (Le roman de Rabelais,
1994). However, there is (as there has ever been)
not just a literary but also a more legendary side
of Rabelais’s reputation. Dictionaries (be it dic-
tionaries of etymologies, proverbs, or citations),
touristic and culinary guide books, as well as the
Internet search engines show that at least his leg-
end is still very much alive in the French lan-
guage and culture.
Readings: Jacques Boulenger, Rabelais à travers
les âges (Paris: Le Divan, 1925); Richard Cooper, “Le
véritable Rabelais déformé,” Editer et traduire Rabe-
lais à travers les âges, ed. Paul J. Smith (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1997); Marcel De Grève, L’interprétation de
Rabelais au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1961); Guy
Demerson, Rabelais (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Donald M.
Frame, François Rabelais. A Study (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Stephen Rawles and
M. A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Edi-
tions of Rabelais before 1626 (Geneva: Droz, 1987);
L. Sainéan, L’influence et la réputation de Rabelais
(Paris: Gamber, 1930).
Paul J. Smith
REFORMATION Although Rabelais had lit-
tle liking for John Calvin, Rabelais, like Calvin,
ended his days a virtual refugee. Rabelais had
fled to the city of Metz shortly after the publi-
cation of his controversial Third Book in 1546,
the same year that printer Etienne Dolet was
burned at the stake. Rabelais feared that his
sometimes audacious writings, reflective to some
degree of the spirit of free inquiry typical of both
humanism and the Reformation—both of
which advocated a return to the sources (ad fon-
tes) and the exercise of critical discernment on
those documents—might result in retaliation
from the Sorbonne or even the crown. The Fac-
ulty of Theology banned Rabelais’s Fourth
Book as well in 1552, and the historical record
yields few clues about the embattled author’s
whereabouts thereafter.

Rabelais, like his protectress Marguerite de
Navarre, was an evangelical rather than a Prot-
estant (the distinction being that evangelicals did
not wish to leave the Catholic Church, but rather
wanted to reform it from within by applying cer-
tain Protestant criteria, such as reliance on Scrip-
ture alone for revelation rather than on the two-
tiered Catholic system of authority, based on
Scripture twinned with tradition). Yet it is cer-
tainly possible to find proto-Reformed elements
in his oeuvre. To that extent, his work could be
read as suspicious and potentially subversive.
Pantagruel, with its letter from Gargantua to
his son, already gestured in the direction of evan-
gelism by criticizing contemporary techniques of
textual criticism (as well as the legal profession),
thereby undermining accepted authorities. Partic-
ularly in Gargantua, which was published in
1534, probably just prior to the Affaire des Plac-
ards, Rabelais clearly and cogently argued the
case for evangelical doctrine with its advocacy
of communal, public confession rather than pri-
vate confession, mediation through Christ alone
rather than priestly intercession, and salvation
through Christ rather than one’s own “works of
righteousness,” as stipulated by Catholic theol-
ogy. Rabelais also attacked clerical corruption,
the distortions of the Sorbonne’s scholastic ap-
proach to texts, and religious superstition in Gar-
gantua. While in the Third Book Rabelais pru-
dently refrained from further direct religious
satire, he continued, albeit less explicitly, to de-
stabilize contemporary systems of knowing and
world-views through his characterization of Pan-
urge, a skeptic never satisfied with any answer
who repeatedly turned systems of knowledge up-
side down. Finally, the Parlement roundly de-
nounced the Fourth Book for its satire concern-
ing Protestants (Papefigues) and Catholics
(Papimanes), as well as its denigration of papal
politics and clerical ambition.
To examine a straightforward illustration of
the effects of evangelism, we might note that Ra-
belais caused Pantagruel, who was moved by
his father’s famed humanist letter and program
for Christian humanist education, to exemplify
the change of heart attendant upon the Christian
conversion process. Upon his encounter with
Panurge, Pantagruel put his words into action
(evoking Protestant plain style, or stylus rudus,
Religion 207
speech scaffolded on the truth of Scripture rather
than adorned with rhetoric for purely aesthetic
purposes). He practiced biblical precepts (“Re-
membering well the words of his father’s letter,
Pantagruel one day decided it was time to test
his knowledge” [GP 105, P 10]), and did not un-
derstand what Panurge was saying until it had
been rendered in the three “biblical” languages—
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—and then translated
into his own native dialect (“I understand . . . or
at least I seem to, because it’s the language we
speak in Utopia” [P 9, GP 104]). In this way, he
endorsed the Protestant request that Scripture be
rendered accessible to everyman by translation
into the vernacular.
But Rabelais never entirely plays by the rules
of any game, and even more so where his ma-
nipulation of rhetoric and tropes of the Refor-
mation is concerned. The Catholic hierarchy
need not have been so concerned that any sort of
unified, monolithic endorsement of proto-
Protestant dogma might emerge from Rabelais’s
work. When Luther, Calvin, and other Protes-
tants called for the Bible to be translated into the
vernacular, the unanticipated consequence was a
Babel of language unleashed, a plethora of per-
spectives and interpretative possibilities that
complicate a formerly fairly orderly intellectual
universe (see Interpretations). This phenome-
non is especially pronounced in Rabelais: mul-
tiple meanings result, suggesting a linguistic var-
iant of glossolalia, an impression only reinforced
by Rabelais’s stylistic penchant for neologism.
The stabilizing of any spiritual authority or the
institutionalizing of spirituality, Rabelais (the
former mystic Franciscan) seems to argue, is al-
ways to be mistrusted.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Gérard Defaux, Panta-
gruel et les sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire de
l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: Ni-
jhoff, 1973); Jan Miernowski, “Literature and Meta-
physics: Rabelais and the Poetics of Misunderstand-
ing,” ER 35: 131–51; Michael Screech, Rabelais.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Catharine Randall
RELIGION A central preoccupation of Rabe-
lais and his contemporaries that left its mark on
208 Religion
both literature and society. Perhaps no other topic
in Rabelais studies has provoked more scholarly
bickering and critical wrangling than Rabelais’s
atttitudes about religion. No small wonder, for
Rabelais himself lived in a time when people
were on tenterhooks about the topic; the criti-
cisms that the schismatic Martin Luther and the
more moderate evangelism movement had lev-
eled against the Catholic Church had institutions
like the Sorbonne and papacy on their guard.
During such times of censure and summary ex-
ecutions, positions on religion were not ex-
pressed with any degree of frankness. Moreover,
Rabelais’s often ambiguous humor does not help
matters because determining the tone of the
laughter, as well as who or what is the true butt
of the jokes, can be a complicated ordeal indeed.
In all of Rabelais’s work, religious expression
runs the gamut and takes on the forms appropri-
ate (or amusingly inappropriate) for the charac-
ters and situations. Consequently, in the matter
of religion, Rabelais has been all things to all
people. However, a selective review of the pre-
dominant positions can elucidate the contentious
issues in Rabelais’s text.
In 1922, Abel Lefranc wrote a preface to Pan-
tagruel that, because of the author’s stature and
the radicality of his interpretation, would rock the
boat of Rabelais studies for years to come. For
Lefranc, Rabelais was a rebellious atheist who
leveled scathing criticisms against religion from
the safe haven that his protectors offered him. As
Rabelais’s giants romped in their imaginary
world, they toppled institutions and squashed hy-
pocritical men underfoot. The Renaissance friar
Rabelais was a man before his time, maneuvering
in a world that his personal genius had outpaced.
Intimately tied to the ideology of his works, Ra-
belais was not above the sardonic laughter of the
biting social critic. In the Problem of Unbelief in
the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais
(1942), Lucien Febvre squared off against this
view, making a plea for placing the sixteenth
century friar back in his time. He portrayed Ra-
belais as a champion of a simple, unadorned
Gospel and an adherent of the evangelism move-
ment of the stripe of Lefèvre d’Etaples, Guil-
laume Briçonnet and Desiderius Erasmus. Feb-
vre’s attachment to history was unwavering, and
his Rabelais lived in a world circumscribed by
environment, with friends like Jean and Guil-
laume du Bellay and enemies like Guillaume
Postel and Noël Béda. Febvre’s Rabelais en-
gaged in contemporary controversy, owed untold
debt to his source readings, and lived in a time
when life outside the Church was impossible,
even unthinkable. The religious differences of
Rabelais’s generation made for a climate of het-
erodoxy, squabbles, and power plays, particu-
larly for the period when the Council of Trent
had not yet reached any doctrinal decisions.
Some critics even see a parody of Trent in both
the council and the storm of the Fourth Book
(4BK [1548 ed.] 8; 4BK 18–22).
The scholars faithful to the tenets of the War-
burg school took Febvre’s desire to place Rabe-
lais in context to heart. Their commitment to Ra-
belais’s sources was tempered by a desire to
explore the literary flair with which Rabelais
transformed his raw material. Michael Screech’s
Rabelais, for example, is resolutely an Erasmian
evangelical Christian whose generous nature,
Christian skepticism, and unshaken confidence
in revealed wisdom leave their mark on the text.
Instead of a waspish critic with no patience for
the ignorant, we see a Rabelais who uses humor
to tolerate fools with Christian indulgence re-
served for the wayward. The focus is on close
reading to capture the spirit of the letter of Ra-
belais. We could add that Rabelais often uses his
characters to take any number of sides in his par-
odies of contemporary debates. This is the case
in the discussion surrounding the foundation of
the Abbey of Thélème (G 50); the debate be-
tween Panurge and Thaumaste, the English the-
ologian (P 17); the reactions of the main char-
acters to the storm in the Quart livre (4BK 21);
and the encounter with the Papimanes and Pap-
efigues (4BK 45–47 and 48–53).
In light of the nature of Rabelais’s criticisms
of the Church, some critics have drawn Rabelais
closer to the Renaissance writers who had sym-
pathies for what would later become the Refor-
mation movement, like Marguerite de Navarre
and Clément Marot. The ideas of evangelicals
and early Reformers do overlap in some respects
(such as mockery of depraved clergy, critique of
papal indulgences, distrust of stale theological
rhetoric, and a marked preference for the Pau-
line scriptures). However, most critics agree that

Rabelais was no “lutherien” in the strictest sense,
although in his time the word was rather indis-
criminately employed to denote all of the “new”
religious views. Nor did Rabelais’s portrayal of
divination (see Prophecy) in the Third Book
(10–25) show any disquieting predilection for the
darker sciences, but rather, as Jean Céard has
noted, a playful fascination and a condemnation
of future-telling astrologie judiciaire (“judicial
astrology”). The same must be said for the var-
ious prognostications Rabelais authored, the
search for the oracle of the dive bouteille (3BK
47) (see Bacbuc), and his depiction of Her
Trippa (3BK 25) and all manner of “devils” and
“devilments.” On the other hand, Rabelais’s
“hermeticism” or “mysticism” still inspires de-
bate over what the “plus hault sens” (higher
meaning) might be. Those scholars who empha-
size Rabelais’s materialism contest its existence,
but most readers still wonder where the “sub-
stantificque mouelle” (“substantive marrow” [G
prol.]) or “quinte essence” (“fifth essence” [G, P,
title page]) can be found in Rabelais’s text and
how to extract them. It seems that Rabelais’s re-
ligious expression evolved over time. The water-
shed moment shows itself in the Third Book,
which invites Marguerite de Navarre’s “esprit
abstraict, ravy, et ecstatic” (“abstract, rapt, and
ecstatic spirit”) to descend to earth and enjoy a
more soulful laughter than found in the previous
books. Since the coexistence of the concrete and
the profound relates directly to Rabelais’s relig-
ious expression, it is worthwhile to suggest some
ways in which religion comes to the fore.
Religion, and particularly biblical allusions,
burst forth in Rabelais’s language play. The most
famous of these must be Frère Jean’s pun on
the “service divin” (“divine service”) and the
“service du vin” (“wine service”) (G 25). Here
the wine in the holy chalice (blood of Christ) and
the wine in the table glass (Bacchic celebration)
are assimilated by an “apophthegme monachal”
or monacal precept that seems, in our view, more
like a kind of linguistic transubstantiation. Par-
odies or allusive borrowings from the Vulgate
and Latin liturgy support this throughout the text,
such as echoing Christ’s words on the cross (“I
thirst”) when asking for wine. Such allusions also
turn raunchy, as when the Psalm Ad te levavi (I
Religion 209
lifted up unto Thee) is used to refer to the male
anatomy. Talk of the sacrament of marriage be-
tween Panurge and Pantagruel in the Tiers livre
leaves ample opportunity for easy jokes and
more profound probing of scriptural ambiguities.
Rabalais’s characters and their actions can
stage religious questions. Frère Jean, the monk
who uses the holy cross as a battering ram to
protect the little vineyard of the abbey of Seuillé,
is not the contemplative cleric we expect but
springs into action when needed. Moreover, with
a kind of kinetic confidence, he makes do with
what the Lord provides (G 25). At each group
interaction, such as during the storm at sea in
the Fourth Book (18–24), each character enters
into dialogue about deep religious questions with
his own brand of wisdom. Frère Jean has the mo-
nopoly on the practical, Panurge dabbles with
folly of all sorts (Christian and otherwise), and
Pantagruel provides the true measure of the
Christian prince.
Rabelais pokes fun at religious institutions that
he considered awry and proposes utopian new
ones. The most scathing attacks take aim at the
Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology. The most
amusing of these jabs is the theft of the bells of
Notre Dame (G 16–18). The jargon-filled ha-
rangue of Janotus de Bragmardo makes this
windbag’s attempt to see them returned into a
parody of academic vanity. The sorbonagres, a
pejorative term for Gargantua’s sophist precep-
tors, wreak havoc on the young giant (G 20–22):
their vain daily routines, set like monastic clock-
work, actually seem to distance the young giant
from his faith. Frère Jean, in the abbey of Seuillé
he so bravely defended, sees lazy, fearful monks
more preoccupied with their bellies and their
own hides than the cause of Christ. The “battling
Benedictine” will have no part of that lifestyle
when Gargantua founds an abbey to recognize
his valor in the war with Picrochole. The monk
becomes a reformer in his own right when he sets
the rules of order of an anti-monastery, the Ab-
bey of Thélème (G 50–56), a utopian “anti-
institution” that cuts a sharp contrast with mo-
nastic isolation and empty routine. The reader of
subsequent editions can see the textual variants
as an indicator of Rabelais’s potentially offensive
wording in theological matters.
The 1533–34 editions of Pantagruel seem to
210 Renaissance
be more aggressive toward the Sorbonne. Critics
have seen the systematic replacement of théolo-
gien with sophiste in the 1540 and 1542 editions
of Gargantua and Pantagruel as either a biting
comment that adds insult to injury or a meaning-
ful concession to the threat of censorship. How-
ever enlightening, noting a few ways Rabelais
expresses thoughts on religion drives home the
fact these works are more than the sum of their
parts. Who was Rabelais’s God? Mikhail Bakh-
tin claimed that He dwelt in the religion of the
people, a popular piety steeped in folk culture
and carnavalesque celebration. At the center of
this faith was laughter. Indeed, if Bakhtin did not
take pains to remind us that Rabelais, following
Aristotle, asserted “laughter is characteristic of
humankind” (“le rire est le propre de l’homme”),
we could be startled at the Russian critic’s quasi-
deification of the most human of emotions. At
the very least, laughter, as man’s exclusive prop-
erty, sits at the heart of Rabelais’s humanism.
Perhaps it offers “redemption” as well—for even
if laughter is no Messiah in Rabelais, while read-
ing his text we cannot help but think that it must
be God’s greatest gift.
Readings: (Most major studies of Rabelais in the
general bibliography address his religious thought and
cannot all be cited here.) Jean Céard, La nature et les
prodiges, L’insolite au 16e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1977);
Reuben C. Cholakian, “A Re-Examination of the Tem-
pest Scene in the Quart Livre,” FS 21.2 (April 1967):
104; Richard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’Eglise,” Rabelais
en son demi-millénaire: actes du colloque interna-
tional de Tours (24–29 septembre 1984) (Geneva:
Droz, 1988); Gérard Defaux, Pantagruel et les soph-
istes. Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chré-
tien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Lucien
Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Cen-
tury, The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb
(1942; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Robert Griffin, “The Devil and Panurge,” SF
16.46 (1972): 329–36; Paul Imbs, “Le diable dans
l’œuvre de Rabelais: Etude de vocabulaire,” Mélanges
de linguistique française offerts à M. Charles Bruneau
(Geneva: Droz, 1954); Eva Kushner, “Was Picrochole
Free? Rabelais between Luther and Erasmus,” CLS
14.4 (1977): 306–20; Abel Lefranc, ed., Pantagruel,
vols. 3–4, Oeuvres de François Rabelais (Paris:
Champion, 1912–27); Claude A. Mayer, “The Genesis
of a Rabelaisian Character: Menippus and Frère Jean,”
FS 6 (1952): 219–29; Lynette Muir, “The Abbey and
the City: Two Aspects of the Christian Community,”
AJFS 14: 32–38; François Rigolot, “ ‘Enigme’ et ‘Pro-
phétie’: Les langages de l’hermétisme chez Rabelais,”
Oeuvres et critiques 11.1 (1986): 37–47; Michael A.
Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Ra-
belais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (Lon-
don: Arnold, 1958); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais and
the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reforma-
tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992); Florence
Weinberg, The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic
Christianity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1972).
Amy C. Graves
RENAISSANCE The Renaissance initially
flowered in Italy in the late fourteenth century
(most associate its inception with Petrarch) and
slowly moved northward. In France, the Renais-
sance corresponds almost perfectly to the six-
teenth century. Jules Michelet, the French histo-
rian who coined the term Renaissance, dates its
beginning to 1494 with the arrival of French
troops in Italy and its end in 1592 with the death
of Montaigne. In essence, the period marks the
rediscovery of the ancient authors and their phi-
losophies. Based primarily in philology and its
methods, the humanist movement that accom-
panies the Renaissance looked to Athens and
Rome for models. Confident that the complete
foundation for scientific, moral, and political sys-
tems was already present in the ancients’ writ-
ings, Renaissance scholars poured over classical
texts. Indeed, a certain optimism prevailed during
the early Renaissance. A period of unchallenged
confidence in what the ancients had written of
man and the cosmos, the first thirty years of the
sixteenth century were the “golden age” of the
Renaissance.
As the Renaissance progressed, however, in-
tellectuals registered more dissension, for they
began to realize the impossibility of reconciling
what they read in the ancients with their own
experience. This time of questioning corresponds
to the time when Rabelais penned his novels
(1530–50). A series of crises undermined the
confidence of the “golden age” of rediscovery:
education, cosmology, cosmography, medicine,
science, politics, ethics, religion, and language
are only a few areas where reality did not fit the

neatly packaged vision of man and the world that
the ancients had left for posterity. The world had
grown more intricate than it had seemed to the
ancients. New theories and novel forms of in-
quiry had to reflect the unprecedented complexity
that nagged intellectuals by midcentury. Conse-
quently, “variety” reoccurs as a leitmotif in texts
written at that time, and traces of relativism ac-
company all intellectual endeavors. It could be
said that Mannerist and Baroque styles attempted
to express this newly felt complexity. Knowledge
(of man and the world), which had been so stable
for so long, suddenly generated more questions
than it could answer.
As soon as the Renaissance took hold in
France, many of its central values (universal
ethics, unity between the microcosm and the
macrocosm, the predominance of Latin, etc.)
came under attack. The decline of the Renais-
sance, and consequently of the values it stood
for, shows through in the institutions that served
to educate the elite of the time. Numerous trea-
tises written by aristocrats recommended a more
practical education that emphasized mathematics
(ballistic), geography, and history. Likewise, the
rising bourgeoisie expected a more practical ed-
ucation for its children, with a focus on arith-
metic and legal education. This utilitarian ap-
proach to learning favored action over theory.
Experience became the most important factor in
defining knowledge. The “useless subjects”
taught in the humanist colleges had to make way
for a more realistic vision of man and the world.
The individual was now a traveling “actor” with
an avoidable body. If philology proved to be the
cornerstone upon which humanism was built,
philological investigations took on particular
characteristics in France. Most Frenchmen as-
serted the “precellence” or unequaled excellence
of French (Gallic) civilization and insisted on the
relativist relationship between history and its in-
stitutions and, in doing so, helped to develop a
nationalistic sentiment. In fact, historians used
relativism as a weapon against the cultural dom-
ination of Latin (and therefore Italian) culture.
But if relativism became a valuable weapon in
favor of the superiority of French culture, the
demonstration could easily be turned around.
Therein lies the theoretical problem of relativism
during the Renaissance: it is a never-ending proc-
Renaissance 211
ess and consequently cannot be invoked to create
a cultural order among civilizations. For this rea-
son, many Renaissance thinkers become primar-
ily observers rather than system builders.
There are very few periods in history where
politics and culture become as closely inter-
twined as they did during the Renaissance. Post-
Machiavellian politics had taken liberties with
the distinctions of classical ethics. At the time
when the concepts of “Realpolitik” and “Raison
d’Etat” emerged, virtue and cruelty dominated
contemporary debate. The public body had lost
its identity and replaced it with its own political
logic, which tended to blur conventional ethics.
The past no longer provided a guide for public
action, even if it could furnish valuable examples
for one’s personal life. This crisis between public
and private life led to a new definition of virtue,
or rather to a dual meaning that applied to all
human actions.
The German art historian Jacob Burckhardt
pointed out that the most important discovery of
the Renaissance was not gunpowder, the com-
pass, or the printing press, but the individual. In-
deed, it is during the Renaissance that the indi-
vidual asserts himself as both the source and end
of knowledge. The Renaissance drew a parallel
between the idea of history and the self who at-
tempts to trace his own existence amid a series
of carefully reported incidents. During the Ren-
aissance, the individual viewed himself as a body
flung into turmoil, searching desperately for
points of reference in his own life, either in the
present or at least within the limits of his own
life’s experiences. The central position of the act-
ing subject has much to do with this new form
of self-expression. Literature, for example, wit-
nessed both the birth of the modern hero (Pan-
urge in the case of Rabelais) and an array of new
genres that bestowed a central role to the subject
(the Essais of Montaigne, for example).
Knowledge itself represented a set of personal
experiences in continual motion, which slowly
supplanted the transmitted knowledge of the an-
cients. Practice counted more than ever and rel-
egated theory to second place. Truth became a
series of particular experiences created, lived,
and repeated by the subject. The writing of these
everyday experiences did not simply reaffirm the
subject’s sense of his own importance in the
212 Rhetoric
world; they also placed him on an equal footing
with any other source of authority (God in-
cluded). Providence no longer dictated the sub-
ject’s existence and a new freedom of thought
and consciousness pointed to the horizon.
For all these reasons, the Renaissance repre-
sents a key historical period in which the indi-
vidual slowly abandoned looking toward the
classical past in order to create his own becom-
ing. With his mind fixed on the future, the in-
dividual emerging during the Renaissance would
soon turn inward to find the necessary resources
to write from the perspective of individual hu-
man actions.
Readings: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy (London: C. K. Paul & Co.,
1878); Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos
in Renaissance Philosophy (New York, 1963); Phi-
lippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of
the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1991); Jules Michelet, “La Renais-
sance,” Renaissance et Réforme, L’histoire de France,
vol. 9 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982).
Philippe Desan
RHETORIC Because of its verve, inventive-
ness, and excesses, along with the Bacchic furor
(“I’ve spent more on wine than on oil” [G prol.,
GB 9]) that lends its exuberant stamp to the text,
Rabelais’s work seems at first glance completely
alien to the norms of rhetoric, or the art of per-
suasion through speech. As one of the boisterous
tipplers or “bien ivres” in chapter 5 of Gargan-
tua points out jokingly, however, drunkenness is
indeed the mother of eloquence: “ ‘Is there any-
one who hasn’t been turned into an orator by
having his glass continually refilled?’—as Hor-
ace puts it” (“Facundi calices quem non fecere
disertum?” [GP 17]) (see Propos des bien ivres).
Notwithstanding its aura of spontaneity, the Pan-
tagrueline epic is in fact permeated with a con-
cern for verbal expressiveness and efficiency,
both key traits of humanism that Paul J. Smith
has rightly described as a “rhetorical preoccu-
pation” or “callilogia.” Borrowed from Guil-
laume Budé, this neologism is diametrically op-
posed to the medieval and scholastic preference
for dialectic, which Budé associates with a dis-
like of language or “misologia.”
This rhetorical preoccupation is evident in the
composition of the work, particularly in the ex-
pertly cultivated abundance of the elocutio,
which, as Terence Cave notes, is in keeping with
the recommendations of Erasmus in his De du-
plici copia verborum et rerum (1511). Charac-
terized as a “cornucopia of gaiety” (3BK prol.)
in the Third Book prologue, Rabelais’s text with
its interminable lists at times seems more remi-
niscent of the Danaides’s cask, especially in such
passages as the blazon of Triboullet’s attributes
(3BK 38). This preoccupation with rhetoric also
figures in the paradoxical or satirical eulogies fa-
vored by Panurge, which follow and build upon
the tradition of the Second Sophistry in general
and of Lucian of Samosate in particular (see his
Praise of the Fly). The shortest of these satirical
eulogies, the “éloge des braguettes,” or Praise of
Codpieces [3BK 8]), has been interpreted both
as a derision of Galen’s theory about the gen-
eration of sperm in the testicles (M. A. Screech)
and as a tribute to the biological immortality of
the grotesque body, associated by Mikhail
Bakhtin with popular culture. In a second ex-
ample of this genre, “l’éloge des dettes” or the
Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4), Anna Ogino sees
the expression of a new type of imagination that
is concomitant with, and characteristic of, the
emergence of a market economy in Europe. Fur-
thermore, the entire conclusion of the Third Book
(49–52) constitutes a panegyric of the Panta-
gruelion, a plant with a thousand uses that is
identified with hemp-flax and interpreted in al-
most as many ways, representing for some an
evocation of hasishism, for others the celebration
of human inventiveness, and for still others an
apology for cannabis. This rhetorical focus is
also evident in the sales pitch of the narrator,
who is a parody of the captatio benevolentiae, in
the prologue to Pantagruel, which conforms
point by point to the precepts of rhetoric, both
epideictic and deliberative, particularly in its di-
vision into parts: narration, confirmation, refuta-
tion, and peroration. In keeping with humanistic
efforts to restore rhetoric and its five traditional
parts in their entirety, moreover, Rabelais’s “rhe-
torical preoccupation” extends well beyond the
processes of style alone. In addition to consid-
erations related to the dispositio (arrangement) as
we have seen above, the dispute by signs be-
tween Thaumaste and Panurge (P 19) refers to

the actio (delivery) as well, playing upon the
meaning and propriety of the orator’s gestures as
described by Quintilian.
Rabelais’s work offers more than rhetoric in
action, however, for it also provides a reflection
on rhetoric, echoing the polemics surrounding
Petrus Ramus’s (Pierre de la Ramée) reform of
the curriculum and the attendant restructuring of
the domains of rhetoric and dialectic, as reflected
in the Fourth Book prologue where Pierre Gal-
land and Pierre “Rameau” are petrified by Jupiter
for their philautia or self-love. For example, the
Rabelaisian text self-reflectively evokes the myth
of a French Hercules who uses speech to enchain
his adversaries in the Fourth Book’s dedicatory
epistle to Odet de Coligny and in its reiteration
in the Fifth Book conquest of India by Bacchus
(OC 5BK 38–39; GP 5BK 39–40). Furthermore,
the Gallic doctor’s designation of his prologue to
Gargantua as a “prelude,” a term previously re-
served for music, seems to refer to Aristotle’s
Rhetoric (3.14); and the Fourth Book harbors nu-
merous technical terms belonging to rhetorical
nomenclature, whose meaning is elucidated in
the Briefve Déclaration (for example, “proso-
popoeia,” “period,” and “solecism”). This self-
reflective tendency often announces explicitly
and facetiously the very processes used, as we
see in Epistémon’s response to Panurge about
the latter’s plan to give his future wife a monk
as her fool or “fou”: “Nay, teur, [ . . . ] through
the figure of tmesis” (5BK 28), retorts Epistémon
obscenely, referring to the rhetorical process of
separating a word in two parts. Throughout, how-
ever, in Rabelais’s rhetoric in action and in his
self-reflective tendencies, eloquence is never en-
visioned as an ossified technique to be called
upon at will. Instead, it is invariably represented
as a dynamic process in which offenses against
good taste, decency, and rules emerge as a po-
tential rhetorical figure in their own right, follow-
ing the example of Frère Jean who legitimizes
his own use of swear words by invoking the
model of Cicero: “That was just verbal decora-
tion,” he says, “just Ciceronian rhetoric” (G 39).
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text.
Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Guy Demerson, “Tra-
dition rhétorique et création littéraire chez Rabelais,”
Etudes de lettres 2 (1984): 3–23; Anna Ogino, Les
Ringing Island 213
éloges paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart livres de
Rabelais. Enquête sur le comique et le cosmique à la
Renaissance (Tokyo: Tosho, 1989); Paul J. Smith,
“Fable ésopique et dispositio épidictique. Pour une ap-
proche rhétorique du Pantagruel,” Rabelais pour le
XXIe siècle, actes du colloque du Centre d’études su-
périeures de la Renaissance (Chinon-Tours 1994), ed.
Michel Simonin, ER 33 (Geneva: Droz, 1998): 91–
104; Paul J. Smith, “Aspects de la rhétorique rabelais-
ienne,” Neophilologus 67.2 (1983): 175–85.
Claude La Charité
RINGING ISLAND (L’ISLE SONANTE)
Complete editions of Rabelais’s works including
the first four books and the Pantagrueline Prog-
nostication had been in print since 1553, but it
was only in 1562 that Ringing Island (L’Isle son-
ante, par M. Francoys Rabelais, qui n’a point
encores esté imprimée, ne mise en lumière: en
laquelle est continuée la navigation faicte par
Pantagruel, Panurge et autres ses officiers) first
appeared, in an edition providing no indication
of the place of publication or editor. This enig-
matic publication, a satire of the papacy and the
Church, has been the object of much speculation
regarding both its authorship and the circum-
stances of its appearance during a time of relig-
ious unrest. Is it a posthumous Rabelaisian text
or a Protestant pamphlet? Is the person behind
this publication someone close to Rabelais bent
on perpetuating his memory? Or is it someone
close to the Reformation who is appropriating
the name of a famous author, listed in the papal
Index of prohibited books published by Paul IV?
The material evidence is minimal: the watermark
is suggestive of paper originating in Touraine or
Geneva, indicating that the work might have
been printed in La Rochelle or Orléans, with an-
other edition, now lost, published in Geneva. But
the virulent religious criticism does not neces-
sarily imply a Protestant editor: Catherine de’
Medici had instructed France’s representatives at
the 1562 session of the Council of Trent to
stress the importance of fighting clerical abuses
(including the misuse of wealth, neglect of one’s
duties, the cult of images, and indulgences).
This text of Ringing Island is known to us in
two other forms: the Fifth Book of the Heroic
Feats and Sayings of Good Pantagruel (Cin-
quiesme livre des faicts et dicts Heroı̈ques du bon
214 Rondibilis
Pantagruel), published in 1564, and a manuscript
from the sixteenth century, neither of which re-
produces the last chapter, the Island of the Ig-
norant (“Apedeftes”), or the paragraph that pre-
cedes it. The variants between these three texts
attest to the existence of rough drafts that are
difficult to decipher and poorly classified.
The edition of Ringing Island contains two
long episodes—Ringing Island itself (eight chap-
ters) and the “Chats fourrez” or “Furry Lawcats”
(five chapters)—and three short ones: the Islands
of Ferrements (“Toolmaking Island”), Cassade
(“Island of Lying Illusions”), and Apedeftes (“Is-
land of the Ignorant”). Ringing Island, where Ra-
belais plays with equivocal variations on pape-
gaut (literally “parrot,” but pape means “pope”)
and gaut, is the favorite habitat of “clergyhawks,
monkhawks, preacherhawks, abbothawks, bish-
ophawks, cardinalhawks, and popehawks”
(“Clergaux, Monagaux, Prestregaux, Abbegaux,
Evesgaux, Cardingaux et Papegault” [GP 531;
5BK 2]). It has been compared to the Island of
Birds with its godets (feeding dishes) and mar-
gaux (magpies) near Terre-Neuve, evoked by
Jacques Cartier in his travel narratives. The au-
thor criticizes the customs of the papal court, its
institutions (bells, fasting), and the temporal or-
ganization of the Church (monastic institutions,
orders of knighthood, financing of the clergy).
Religious implications also figure as undercur-
rents in the episodes of the Isles of Ferrements
(“Toolmaking,” 5BK 9) and Cassade (“Lying Il-
lusions” 5BK 10). The idea of the Isle of Fer-
rements (iron tools and weapons), where swords
and knives grow on trees, is borrowed from the
Disciple of Pantagruel, an anonymous work pub-
lished in 1538 that clearly left its mark on Ra-
belais’s Fourth Book: equivocal innuendos, mar-
riages between tools which evoke the alliances
of the Fourth Book (4BK 9), and a reflection on
monsters and predestination have been added.
On the Island of Cassade (a gambling term of
Italian derivation that designates trickery) or the
Isle of Lying Illusions, we also discover an attack
against the Church’s attitude toward gambling
and a denunciation of the sale of relics.
The episode of the Chats Fourrez or “Furry
Lawcats” (5BK 11–15), in which the Chats Four-
rez and their archduke Grippeminault are de-
scribed as monsters, signals the corruption and
venality of the justice system, as well as the re-
lentlessness of the judicial system toward nobles
and those who are innocent. Two of the chapters
in this episode are devoted to an enigma or riddle
in the form of a ten-line poem to heroes, a pa-
rodic version of metempsychosis and a play on
“cosson,” a kind of weevil.
The chapter of the Apedeftes or “ignorant
ones,” an attack against the Court of Auditors
(Cours des Comptes) and the Finance Adminis-
tration, should be read within the context of the
radical reorganization of that office in the mid-
sixteenth century. It is completely foreign to the
stylistic characteristics of the rest of the text,
which correspond to the artificial linguistic sys-
tem Rabelais set up in his other works.
The sharpness of the religious and judicial crit-
icism of Ringing Island brings to mind the acer-
bity of the Fourth Book in 1552, a time of direct
confrontation between the Pope and the king of
France. Given the frequent recycling of satiric
texts in the sixteenth century to fit new circum-
stances, one might hypothesize that Ringing Is-
land is a Rabelaisian text contemporaneous with
the Fourth Book, written during the Gallican cri-
sis of the 1550s to denounce a different political
situation.
Since 1564 Ringing Island has constituted the
first part of the Fifth Book. To these chapters,
which we may in all likelihood attribute to Ra-
belais, the editors have added a second group of
episodes containing a sea journey, which they
append to the text as a conclusion to the Panta-
grueline chronicles.
Readings: Alfred Glauser, Le faux Rabelais (Paris:
Nizet, 1975); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammarien.
De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité,
ER 16 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); G. Mallary Masters,
Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tra-
dition (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1969); Ian R. Morrison, Rabelais: Tiers livre, Quart
livre, Ve livre (London: Grant and Cutler, 1994);
George A. Petrossian, “The Problem of the Authentic-
ity of the Cinquiesme Livre de Pantagruel: A Quan-
titative Study,” ER 13 (1976): 1–64.
Mireille Huchon
RONDIBILIS (3BK 31–34) Physician con-
sulted by Panurge in chapters 31–34 of the
Third Book, whose derogatory views on

women’s anatomy and character, along with
chapters 15 and 22 of Pantagruel, contribute to
Rabelais’s long-standing reputation as an anti-
feminist. Of the five “treatments” for concupis-
cence outlined by the doctor, including wine,
drugs, hard work, study, and copulation, Panurge
opts happily for the last method only to learn that
there is a catch involved. Although marriage,
the only legitimate setting for sex, offers the pos-
sibility of “worthy” offspring, it also carries the
risk of cuckoldry. While Rondibilis’s contention
that all married men either have been, are, will
be, or may be cuckolded is a truism, it hinges
upon a negative appraisal of women. Drawing
upon the ancients, and siding with Plato and Hip-
pocrates against the experimentalist Galen, the
physician characterizes the “feminine organ” as
a voracious and insatiable “animal” (3BK 32),
and the nature of women as “frail, variable, ca-
pricious, inconstant, and imperfect” (3BK 32)—
thus prone to infidelity.
Because Pantagruel makes an explicit con-
nection between Rondibilis and Rabelais, who
supposedly performed together in a morality play
in Montpellier, scholars such as Abel Lefranc of-
ten equate the fictional physician’s opinions with
those of the author himself, thereby interpreting
the episode as a negative contribution to the
Querelle des femmes or Woman Question, a
long-standing debate between idealizers and de-
tractors of women revived by La Broderie in
1542. However, Rondibilis’s preference for Plato
over Galen, though approved by Pantagruel, ar-
guably distances him from Rabelais. Overall,
moreover, the doctor’s own mercenary nature,
Panurge’s scorn for his advice, and Rabelais’s
positive portrayal of women at Thélème suggest
that Rondibilis’s opinion, while representing a
frequently held view in the Renaissance, should
not be considered identical to that of the author.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, Ra-
belais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich, 1977); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:
Duckworth, 1979).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
RONSARD, PIERRE DE (1524–85) Prolific
poet and leading member of the Pléiade who
wrote in a wide range of genres. His work in-
Ruach 215
cludes lyric sonnet sequences, odes after Pindar
and Horace, mythological hymns, elegies, ec-
logues and an unfinished epic. Ronsard encour-
aged the introduction of classical and Italian
models into French poetry, and his work is often
heavily allusive in both theme and form. Ronsard
includes an epitaph for Rabelais (“Epithafe de
François Rabelais”) in his 1554 collection, Le
Bocage, published the year following the older
writer’s death. Part encomium, part burlesque,
the poem begins with a Bacchic vine sprouting
out of Rabelais’s decomposing paunch. Retro-
spective intoxication ensues before death enters
to sober up the proceedings and the epitaph ends
by urging the reader to scatter food and drink,
not flowers, upon Rabelais’s grave. Taken as a
whole, it confirms Rabelais’s reputation as a bon
vivant without telling us too much about what
Ronsard thought of him. Aside from this one in-
stance, direct influence by Rabelais on Ronsard
is hard to prove. Ronsard’s principal editor, Paul
Laumonier, lists a number of possible allusions
to Rabelais, the majority of which follow the
same Bacchanalian theme. Ronsard does make
use of Alcibiades’s comparison between Socrates
and Silenus in “La Lyre, A Jean Belot” (1569),
and it seems likely that he would have known
Rabelais’s version in the prologue to Gargantua.
Yet despite this paucity of textual debt an intrigu-
ing overlap remains. Although belonging to a
younger generation with very different aspira-
tions, Ronsard’s literary debut in 1549–50 falls
between the 1548 and 1552 editions of Rabe-
lais’s Fourth Book. Their contemporaries could
have enjoyed Ronsard’s Pindaric odes or his first
sonnet sequence, Les Amours, alongside the epic
voyage of Panurge and Pantagruel. If for a brief
time only, Rabelais and Ronsard rub shoulders
in the literary marketplace.
Readings: Raymond Lebègue, “Ronsard lecteur de
Rabelais,” BHR 16 (1954): 82–85; Marcel de Grève,
L’interprétation de Rabelais au XVIe siècle (Geneva:
Droz, 1961) 99–103.
Andrea Walkden
RUACH The Hebrew word for breath, ruach,
is defined as “vent ou esprit” in the Briefve Dé-
claration. Rabelais, who had studied Hebrew be-
fore he wrote the Fourth Book, doubtless knew
the connotations of Ruach in the Old Testament,
216 Ruach
where it can mean the breath of the nostrils,
moral character, prophetic furor (as “the spirit
[ruach] of the Lord will rush upon you, and you
will join them in their prophetic state.” [1 Sam.
10.6]), or the creative principle (“The earth was
a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the
abyss, while a mighty wind [ruach] swept over
the waters” [Gen. 1.2]). Rabelais exploits the
gamut of connotations of “vent” and “esprit” in
chapters 43–44.
These chapters are devoted to the “Isle de
Ruach,” following eight chapters on the carnal
Andouilles. By contrast, the inhabitants of Ruach
“live just on wind. They drink nothing, eat noth-
ing—only wind” (GP 471; 4BK 43). Their
houses are weathervanes; the poor nourish them-
selves with fans, while the rich have windmills.
Pantagruel admires them, praising their “form
of government and way of life” (4BK 44).
If the Andouilles can be identified as Luther-
ans who believe in the real presence in the Eu-
charist of the natural body and blood of Christ,
and whose detractors called them “Fleischfres-
ser” or cannibals, the Ruachians, “who live just
on wind,” could be their next-door neighbors, the
Dutch. From the thirteenth century, the land they
inhabit was kept free of water by means of wind-
mills, which were principally used to dry out the
land and to pump the brackish water into canals,
enabling human life to exist in the Low Coun-
tries. In addition, the religious tradition of Hol-
land had long been spiritual in tendency: Thomas
à Kempis (1379–1471) had preached simple
Christianity in imitation of Christ. While he and
his followers did not reject transubstantiation,
they believed that the presence of Christ could
be approached in the spirit outside the sacrament.
The sixteenth-century reformers in Holland were
called the Sacramentisten, designating those who
believed that the body of Christ was only spiri-
tually present. This belief constituted the greatest
difference between them and the Lutherans. Cor-
nelius Hoen, a contemporary of Martin Luther,
argued that Christ’s words, “Take, eat, this is my
body,” etc., should be understood symbolically,
as are his declarations “I am the way, the truth,
and the life,” and “I am the vine and you the
branches.” Luther violently denounced Hoen and
his spiritualizing interpretation in his treatise
“This Is My Body.”
Bringuenarilles, the “broken-nosed” giant
who devours the windmills of the Ruachians and
ultimately comes to grief, might be, like Quar-
esmeprenant, an incarnation of Charles V, who
persecuted the Reformers in Holland but who ul-
timately “breaks his nose” on their stubborn re-
sistance.
Readings: Jean-Jacques Altmeyer, Les précurseurs
de la Réforme aux Pays-Bas, vol. 1 (The Hague: W.-
P. van Stockum, 1886); Karl Brandi, The Emperor
Charles V (London: Macmillan, 1902); Alastair Duke,
Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (Lon-
don: Hamledon, 1990); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe,
la cène et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21
(1988): 131–141; Florence Weinberg, “L’isle de
Ruach,” Rabelais et les leçons du rire (Orléans: Par-
adigme, 2000): 195–205.
Florence M. Weinberg
 S
SAINT-GELAIS, MELLIN (OR MERLIN)
DE (1487/1491–1558) Court poet and one of
the first to use the sonnet in France. As a young
man, he received an excellent humanist educa-
tion including Greek and Latin. After attending
the University of Poitiers, Saint-Gelais spent ten
years in Italy developing a deep admiration for
Italian culture and poetry. In 1518, Saint-Gelais
returned to France where his noble lineage, his
reputation as a poet, and his charm assured him
a place at court. Nevertheless, his poverty con-
vinced him to enter holy orders before being ap-
pointed almoner to the king in 1525. Francis re-
warded his service by naming Saint-Gelais abbot
of La Fresnade (1531) and of Reclus (1532).
Saint-Gelais also served as keeper of the royal
library at Blois between 1536 and 1544. None of
these offices kept the poet from the court where
he organized entertainments for Francis and for
his successor, Henry II.
The poetry of Saint-Gelais, who was a great
friend of Clément Marot, consists of light and
graceful verse—mostly rondeaux and chansons—
as well as witty epigrams. He epitomized the
style attacked by the Pléiade. A quarrel with
Pierre de Ronsard was eventually resolved but
not before most writers of the day had taken
sides. Among Saint-Gelais’s strongest supporters
was his old friend Rabelais whom Saint-Gelais
had probably met in the early days at Poitiers.
Rabelais pays tribute to their friendship in the
prologue to the Fifth Book, where he lists Saint-
Gelais among his model authors, and at the very
end of Gargantua. During the excavation of the
foundation for Thélème, a tablet is unearthed
bearing an “Enigmatic Prophecy” in the style of
“Merlin the prophet.” The riddle is a long poem
by Saint-Gelais to which Rabelais has added two
lines at the beginning and ten at the end. The
poem seems to oppose the optimism of Thélème
when Gargantua interprets it as an allegory of
the religious troubles facing France. Frère Jean
refuses this dark explanation and insists that it
describes a game of tennis.
In his introduction to the English translation,
LeClercq claims that Raminagrobis is “undoubt-
edly Melain de Saint-Gelais,” but there seems to
be little basis for this identification.
Readings: Henri Joseph Molinier, Mellin de Saint-
Gelais (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968); Jean-Yves Pouilloux,
Rabelais: rire est le propre de l’homme (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1993); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Ra-
belais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).
Megan Conway
SAINT-VICTOR, LIBRARY OF (P 7) The
subject of chapter 7 of Pantagruel must have
been a favorite passage of evangelical humanist
readers, but it is incomprehensible to most read-
ers today. Sandwiched between the obvious sat-
ire of the Ecolier Limousin (6) and the serious
humanist message of Gargantua’s letter on ed-
ucation (8), we find a list of 139 (in the 1542
edition) mostly imaginary books in the real Par-
isian library of the monastery of Saint-Victor.
These titles, in French or (usually bad) Latin, are
in no kind of order; some are simply amusing,
while others attack a wide spectrum of satirical
targets.
Most obviously, the large number of “On the
Something of Something” titles, juxtaposing con-
crete and abstract, are mocking many late me-
dieval devotional or educational works with such
titles; L’esperon de fromaige, for instance, recalls
the Esperon de discipline by Rabelais’s friend
Antoine du Saix. Rabelais increases the humor
here by juxtaposing the spur of cheese (wine) to
L’aguillon de vin (cheese). The list’s first two
titles are Bigua salutis (the chariot of salvation)
and Bregueta iuris (the codpiece of the law), sug-
218 Saints, Imaginary
gesting that theology and law will be the main
targets. There is certainly some joking about
both, often so complex that a detailed explana-
tion would occupy several pages. Beda de optim-
itate triparum implies that the celebrated (and by
evangelical humanists, execrated) Sorbonne the-
ologian has a fat paunch, is greedy, and comes
from a lower-class background—tripe is
working-class or peasant food. Preclarissimi
iuris utriusque doctoris Maistre Pilloti Racque-
denari de bobelinandis glosse Accursiane ba-
guenaudis repetitio enucidiluculidissima (OC
1264 n.28) pokes fun at medieval law, the cele-
brated commentator Accursius, glosses (the hu-
manists’ motto was “Keep the texts and scrap the
glosses”), and convoluted titles in “kitchen”
Latin. Note that this absurd adjective contains the
syllable cul, meaning “ass,” or backside.
Some titles alert us to real books that are no
longer read today. Merlinus Coccaius de patria
diabolorum refers to Teofilo Folengo, a maca-
ronic poet whose Baldus is one of Rabelais’s
most important sources; Campi clysteriorum per
§. C. is the genuine title of a medical work by
the Lyonnais doctor Symphorien Champier.
There are a few references to what may be the
century’s funniest book, the Epistles of Obscure
Men, which was sarcastically dedicated to Or-
twin Gratius (a German humanist [1475–1542]).
Ars honeste pettandi in societate per M. Or-
tuinum reminds us of the gross portrait of him in
the book (as well as delighting by its oxymoron:
how does one fart “honorably”?).
This chapter is entirely typical of Rabelais. It
expends enormous energy, inventiveness, and er-
udition on a subject that will never be mentioned
again. It forces the reader to jump from one lan-
guage to another and from subject to subject: the-
ology, law, medicine, even social mores (Le cul-
pelé des vesves probably refers to women’s, and
especially loose women’s, habit of shaving their
pubic hair [but see OC 1265 n.16]). Most im-
portantly, it is at the same time hilariously funny
and (sometimes) profoundly serious, so that we
must constantly be alert for what is, or is not,
being implied.
Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and the Li-
brary of Saint-Victor,” Lapidary Inscriptions: Renais-
sance Essays for Donald A. Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C.
Bowen and Jerry C. Nash (Lexington, KY: French Fo-
rum, 1991); Christophe Clavel, “Rabelais et la créativ-
ité néologique: Quelques remarques sur l’absurdité
d’un monstre linguistique,” ER 39 (Geneva: Droz,
2000): 59–85; Paul Lacroix, Catalogue de la Biblio-
thèque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor au seizième siècle
(Paris: Techener, 1862).
Barbara C. Bowen
SAINTS, IMAGINARY Following the medi-
eval tradition (Eustache Deschamps, Jean Moli-
net, the Sermons joyeux, the sotties or fools’
plays, etc.), Rabelais allows a multitude of imag-
inary saints into his works. Although it is some-
times difficult to determine whether a given saint
is an imaginary one or just an official saint whose
name has been distorted beyond recognition, it is
obvious that the humanist who has an excellent
knowledge of his Medium Aevum revels in evok-
ing them. Of the about 120 occurrences of offi-
cial and imaginary saints mentioned in the five
books (with only eight occurrences of female
saints, and rare mentions of the Virgin Mary),
there are no fewer than twenty-one occurrences
of imaginary saints (for a total of seventeen dif-
ferent imaginary saints; cf. Merceron 2002). Dur-
ing the episode of the great bells of Notre-Dame,
the Parisians after having been “piss-drenched”
by the good giant Gargantua break into a series
of repudiations and cursing. They inextricably
mix official saints such as Fiacre, Treignant
[a.k.a. Ringan or Ninian], and Thibaut, the patron
saint of the cuckolds, with the dubious Saint
Quenet, Saint Foutin, and imaginary ones (G 16
in the 1535 edition and G 17 in the 1542 edition
in which only Mamye has been maintained).
Saint Andouille (the penis) and Saint Foutin (cf.
Old French foutre “to fuck”; but also a possible
intentional distortion of Saint Pothin of Lyon’s
name) are both mentioned here as a pleasant al-
lusion to the giant mentule (“john-thomas,” phal-
lus) of Gargantua. Additionally called vit
(“prick”), the Gargantua’s appendix also tran-
spires in the Saint Vit (⫽Guy) of the 1535 edi-
tion. Saint Quenet seems to be a diminutive form
of con (“cunt”). Saint Guodegrin (maybe from
Saint Chrodegand, bishop of Metz) is a reversed
pun on grand godet (“great drinking cup” [G 16
in the 1535 edition]). The female Saint Mamye
(m’amye [“my friend”] or ma mie [“my half”])
is an inviting “Saint Girl Friend,” while the fe-

male Saint Nytouche (“don’t touch it”) is a kind
of prudish “Saint Hands-Off” (G 27). Born from
the bursting bellies of women who overate nèfles
(“medlars”), Saint Pansard or Saint Fatpaunch
(from panes, meaning “big belly”) is a facetious
saint who personifies the Big Belly of the Car-
nival giant, who was already mentioned by Gau-
thier of Coincy in 1218. The king Saint Panigon
(Italian panicone, “Guzzler”) represents the
model of a debonair monarch who reigns on a
sort of land of Cokaigne, the rich and fertile Is-
land of Cheli (4BK 10). Other imaginary or du-
bious saints partake in the realms of bawdiness
and scatology, such as Saint Balleran (ms. BNF,
5BK 32 bis) or Saint Bal(l)etrou (Saint Shake-
hole): “ ‘A turd for them, a turd!’ exclaims Pan-
urge. ‘My codpiece alone will sweep all the men
down, and Saint Balletrou that lies inside will
brush out all the women’ ” (P 26; see also “the
feast of St Baletrou” [5BK 15], replaced by Saint
Hurluburlu in the 1564 edition). Saint Adauras
(Lat. Ad auras “to the winds”) is the imaginary
patron saint of those who are hanged (P 17).
Saint Fredon (Saint Quaver) and Saint Fredonne
(Saint Quaveress) are imaginary characters in-
vented by Panurge (OC 5BK 27; GP 5B 28) in
response to Friar Fredon’s monosyllabic replies
(a fredon is a type of quaver, or musical trill).
Rabelais by no means invented all of these imag-
inary saints. Several came from the medieval tra-
dition, and we know that he borrowed Saint Al-
ipentin (“By St Alipentin, what a sweet scent!
Devil take this turnip-eater, how he stinks!” [P
6]), as well as the burlesque martyrdom of Saint
Guodegrin, who was “killed by cooked apples,”
from the Vie de Saint Christophe, a Mystery Play
by Maistre Chevalet (Grenoble, 1530). However,
he used them with a playful efficiency that al-
ways added new layers of semantic complexity
to his texts.
Readings: Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel
John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Pen-
guin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,”
RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les
saints préposés aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199–
216; Claude Gaignebet, À plus haut sens. L’ésotérisme
spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Mai-
sonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabe-
lais et les Saints,” BAARD 12.8 (1969): 239–43;
Saints, Real 219
Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imagi-
naires et facétieux (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
Jacques E. Merceron
SAINTS, REAL Men or women who, after
death, receive an official, public, and universal
cult (cult of dulia) from the Catholic Church and
from the faithful, based on the very high degree
of Christian perfection they attained during their
lives. Rabelais’s writings and ideas on saints and
the cult of saints are set within the context of a
polemical debate that, despite its undoubtedly
very contemporary overtones, is also deeply
rooted in the medieval tradition. Already, high
prelates such as Cardinal Bessarion had pru-
dently raised doubts about the reliability of some
of the old Saints’ Lives. Erasmus (1466?–1536)
had made some ironic comments about “super-
stitious” devotions toward saints in his In Praise
of Folly (1511) (chap. 50–51). However, it is
during Rabelais’s own time that reformists be-
came increasingly more determined and daring
in their denunciation of the cult of saints and its
use by the papacy. For example, Martin Luther
(1483–1546) ridiculed the astronomical number
of canonizations. Furthermore, the debate about
saints took an even sharper focus towards 1534–
35: in October 1534, the Affair of the Placards
started when “bills and libels defaming God and
His saints” (Belleforest), as well as the holy
mass, were posted on the French king’s own
apartments during the night. Later, the Sorbonne
theologians sharply criticized the position of Me-
lanchthon, a Lutheran philosopher (1497–1560),
when he was solicited, on June 23, 1535, by
King Francis I, to debate the Paris University
theologians. Among other things, Melanchthon
denounced the excesses and abuses brought
about by the belief in the healing power of saints.
This represented, he contended, a way for greedy
priests to profiteer (the fourth of the twelve ar-
ticles addressed to the king). It is against this
backdrop of heightened tensions between the
Sorbonne on the one hand, and the evangelists
and the reformists on the other hand, that the
publication of Gargantua took place, probably
in 1535. John Calvin (1509–64), for his part,
later warned in his Treatise on Relics (Traité des
Reliques [1543]) that the veneration of relics,
even when they were authentic, “rarely goes
220 Saints, Real
without superstition” and can even border on
idolatry. Reformists Pierre Viret (1511–71), in
his Treatise on True and False Religion (Traicté
de la Vraye et Fausse Religion [1560]) and Henri
Estienne (1531–98) in his Apology for Herodotus
(Apologie pour Hérodote [chap. 38, 1566]), de-
bunked idolatry and superstition, focusing partic-
ularly on imaginary saints possessing supposed
healing powers.
When considering Rabelais’s position in this
debate, it is worth mentioning from the onset that
in his works the humanist almost never speaks
about the saints themselves. On the other hand,
he repeatedly comes back to the subject of the
official cult of saints as promoted by the
Church’s hierarchy, as well as the subject of pop-
ular devotions and rituals. Saint Paul, a rallying
figure for the evangelists, is one of the few saints
presented in a positive narrative context. Aside
from that, Rabelais uses the hagiographic mate-
rial on two distinct levels: a rhetorical and “po-
etic” level and an ideological level. The first
level essentially concerns verbal nimbleness and
playfulness. Rabelais spices up the discourse of
his characters through a multitude of brief utter-
ances that aim to reproduce the flavor of the oral
language of the time: invocations to the saints
(“By St Fiacre of Brie” [P 11]; “By St Thibault,
he said, you speak the truth” [P 13]), swearing
(“By St Anthony’s belly” [P 11]; “By St Ar-
nauld’s head” [3BK 42]), curses and maledic-
tions (“May St Anthony’s fire [ergotism] burn
the bum-gut of the goldsmith” [G 13]), familiar
and facetious expressions such as the one in
which a monk or prelate of the Antonians’ Order
is nicknamed commandeur jambonnier de sainct
Antoine, an allusion to their real and emblematic
pigs (“a Master-mendicant of the Order of St An-
thony” [G 17]).
Rabelais seems to derive an almost inebriating
pleasure from hurling his burlesque litanies (G
16 in the 1535 edition; G 27). One of his favorite
comic patterns consists of setting up zany, in-
congruous unions between the realm of saint-
hood and other areas such as wine, sex, and sca-
tology. For example, the pun on service divin—
service du vin (divine service—wine service [G
27]) runs through many hagiographical occur-
rences, such as in the genealogical juxtaposition
of pardoners carrying relics and wine harvesters
carrying grape baskets (G 1). In the mouth of
Rabelais’s characters, saints and wines have a cu-
rious tendency to mix and swirl around: “By St
Quenet’s guts, let’s talk of drink” (G 5), “by St
James’ belly, what shall we drink?” (G 27). Balls
and farts also pair nicely with sacred figures:
“Friar Screwball trussed himself up to the bal-
locks, and lifted the said petitioner Dodin on to
his back, like a pretty little St Christopher” (3BK
23); “By the burden of St Christopher, I’d as
soon undertake to get a fart out of a dead don-
key” (3BK 36).
On the ideological level, it should be noted
that far from denouncing the saints, Rabelais
mainly takes aim at their official cult and at the
popular and superstitious devotions that are fos-
tered by the Sorbonne’s caphards (“hypocrites”)
and by other members of the Catholic hierarchy.
Rabelais also lashes out against the mendicant
friars, those “peddlers of rogatons [relics]” who,
being skilled at enticing more gapers at a cross-
road than “a good preacher of the Gospels,” are
nonetheless not worth more than those quacks
that perform on a stage (G 17). He also scoffs at
people who insist on resorting to saints for curing
illnesses or even for special protection. Garga-
melle, for example, despite being in the throes
of childbirth declares, “I much prefer to listen to
some excerpts from the Scriptures and I feel
much better for it than listening to the Life of St
Margaret or some other pack of lies” (G 5 in the
1535 edition; removed from G 6 in the 1542 edi-
tion). As an evangelist and a humanist physician,
Rabelais, as well as Paracelsus (1493–1541),
never tires of attacking the notion common
among ordinary people that if a saint is angered
by the neglect of his or her cult, or for any other
reason, the saint may resort to vengeance and
exercise a harmful influence on people’s daily
lives (harvests, human and cattle illnesses, etc.).
Such a conception was already seen in some of
Gregory of Tours’ Miracles of Saint Martin and
in some narratives of Jacobus of Voragina’s
Golden Legend.
Rabelais also launches a frontal and forceful
assault against the notion of the mal de saint (the
“saint’s illness”). According to this common
idea, which was probably cultivated by popular
preachers among the laity, the same saint that is
perceived as specializing in the cure of a partic-

ular illness can inflict that same illness in human
beings and animals. This idea, Rabelais insists,
is blasphemous, scandalous, and steeped in pa-
ganism: “Oh,” said Grandgousier, “you poor
creatures. Do you imagine that the plague comes
from St Sebastian?” “Yes, of course,” replied
Wearybones, “our preachers assure us that it
does.” [ . . . ] Do they blaspheme God’s holy
saints in this fashion, making them seem like
devils who do men nothing but harm? [ . . . ]
There was a canting liar preaching at Cinais to
the same tune, that St Anthony sent fire into
men’s legs, and St Eutropius sent the dropsy, and
St Gildas sent madness, and St Genou the gout”
(G 45).
Rabelais is much harsher on blasphemous
preachers, who are liable to be brought before
justice, than on simple pilgrims who are char-
acterized as “poor and simple people.” Rabelais
immediately offers them an alternative to their
superstitious practices. Rejecting pilgrimages as
nothing but “otiose and useless trips,” Rabelais,
speaking through Grandgousier’s voice, replies
to the pilgrims, “Live as the good apostle St. Paul
directs you. If you do so you’ll have the protec-
tion (la garde) of God, of the angels and of the
saints with you, and no plague or evil will bring
you harm” (G 45; cf. also 4BK 46). In contrast
to the protection of saints for those living a truly
evangelical life, he is forceful in his denunciation
of a religion that is based more on superstitious
fear (and greed) than on true Christian caritas or
charity.
Luckily for the reader, Rabelais’s discourse on
saints often takes a more burlesque form. For ex-
ample, he speaks of the saints de glace, the “frost
saints” (generally Saints Mark, Eutropius, Philip,
and George) who, according to the peasants,
threaten the vine-shoots from the end of April to
mid-May. He attributes to a certain Tinteville,
bishop of Auxerre, an amazing project of calen-
dar reform. “So he came to the conclusion that
the aforementioned saints were St Hailers, St
Freezers, and St Spoilers of the vine-buds.
Therefore he decided to transfer their feasts into
the winter, between Christmas and Typhany”
(3BK 33). The bishop then intends to replace
them in their original winter slots by shoot-
warming saints from the July–August “dog-days”
period!
Salmigondin 221
Many other practices related to saints receive
brief mentions in Rabelais’s works, often in hu-
morous or satirical contexts: oaths on the parish
saints (G 17) and relics (“by the backbone of St
Fiacre of Brie” [3BK 47]; “By St Rigomer’s
arm” [4BK 39]); invocations and vows addressed
to saints in case of mortal danger (to Barbara,
George, and the imaginary Nytouche! [G 27]; to
Michael and Nicholas [4BK 19]); mock fighting
plays of saints against dragons (Clement of Metz
against the Graouli monster [4BK 59]); chil-
dren’s games (“Saint Cosma, I come to worship
you” and “At Saint Founded” [G 22]), etc. Fi-
nally, according to Claude Gaignebet, although
not directly mentioned, three saints play an un-
derlying role in Rabelais’s works. These three
have a role in defining his heroes by sharing the
same birth dates: Saint Blasius, patron saint of
the throat, breath, and winds, on February 3,
birth date of Gargantua (G 4); Saint James the
Greater and Saint Christopher, dog-days saints
celebrated on July 25, birth date of the “thirsty”
Pantagruel (G 2, Fanfreluches, vv. 73–74; P 2).
Readings: Donald Attwater and Catherine Rachel
John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Pen-
guin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,”
RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les
saints préposés aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199–
216; Claude Gaignebet, À plus haut sens. L’ésotérisme
spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Mai-
sonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabe-
lais et les saints,” BAARD 2.8 (1969): 239–43; Jacques
E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et
facétieux (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
Jacques E. Merceron
SALMIGONDIN Name of the Castellany (the
extent of land and jurisdiction appertaining to a
castle) that is given first to Alcofrybas (P 32)
and, after the anagrammatic narrator’s disap-
pearance, to Panurge (3BK 2), which has gen-
erally been interpreted as an oversight by Rabe-
lais. Considering that “salmigondis” is a type of
ragout, a hotchpotch of leftover meats, one could
also see a design behind the property’s reassign-
ment. Reminiscent of the farce and the coq-à-
l’âne, such an eclectic mixture fits well in the
overall culinary poetics of the first two books.
The elimination of the farceur Alcofrybas, first
warden of the evocatively named Castellany, in
222 Satin/Ouy-Dire
favor of the more serious “medical doctor Fran-
çois Rabelais” on the title page, indicates a
change in orientation, away from the realm of
farce and non sequitur to a more serious type of
satirical mixture. Putting Panurge in charge of
the “Salmigondin” underscores this change as the
trickster’s diminishing status in the Third and
Fourth Books parallels the fate of the farce. We
see the culmination of this decline in the Papi-
manes episode, where Homenaz’s farce gives
Epistémon diarrhea (4BK 51), as well as in Pan-
urge’s similar ridiculous reaction in that book’s
final scene (4BK 67).
Moreover, wasting the income from this new
property promptly leads Panurge to the Praise of
Debts (3BK 3–4), the first demonstration of his
verbal virtuosity in the Third Book and the first
one that does not meet with Pantagruel’s ap-
plause, ultimately resulting in a reversal of the
mentor/disciple relationship that had cemented
the trickster’s prominent status in Pantagruel.
The term occurs two more times in the Fourth
Book, both times in disturbing, monstrous farces:
first, personified as one of the cooks in Frère
Jean’s culinary army assembled to fight the chit-
terlings (4BK 40), and second, as one of the of-
ferings to Messere Gaster (4BK 59). A symbol
of the generating principle of the first two books’
farce, directed by Alcofrybas and Panurge, the
“salmigondin” thus illustrates the shift in Rabe-
lais’s strategy by turning it into the target of a
more literary satire.
Readings: François Dumont, “La donation du Sal-
migondin, Tiers livre II,” François Rabelais. Ouvrage
publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553–
1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Bernd Renner, “From
Fearsome to Fearful: Panurge’s Satirical Waning,”
Fear and Its Representation in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, ed. A. Scott and C. Kosso, ASMAR
6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
Bernd Renner
SATIN/OUY-DIRE (HEARSAY) The epi-
sode of Satin (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 29–30) con-
sists of two connected descriptive parts: the first
one is consecrated to the zoological marvels of
the Land of Satin, and the second to the court of
Ouy-Dire (Hearsay) and his followers. The name
“Satin” indicates that the animals of the island
are not real but in fact are a trompe l’oeil because
they are made of satin tapestry. The narrative
point of view is markedly that of the narrator,
who opens most sentences with the phrase
“There I saw.” The narrator begins by giving a
lengthy description of the elephants he sees, full
of learned allusions to Pliny the Elder, Juba,
Pausanias, Philostratos, and Aelian, but without
naming Cardanus’s De subtilitate (1550), which
probably is Rabelais’s main source here. He con-
tinues to describe a rhinoceros, using unspecified,
traditional information from natural history, but
intermingled with a curious allusion to a rhino
(or a rhino’s picture?) shown to him by Hans
Cleberg, a German merchant living in Lyon. The
following description of a flock of thirty-two (!)
unicorns is a grotesque parody of traditional de-
scriptions of this fabulous animal, known as rare,
solitary, and ferocious—very different from the
description of the gentle animal found in the Me-
damothi episode of the Fourth Book. Dozens of
other animals are listed and sometimes described
in more detail. Most of the longer descriptions
(eales, cucrocutes, manticores) are direct trans-
lations from Pliny’s Natural History, while oth-
ers come from popular, carnivalesque sources:
“There I saw Mid-lent on horseback,” “There I
saw two-backed beasts.” In the land of Satin, the
Pantagruelians only find deceiving irrealities,
contenting the eye but not the stomach. Paul J.
Smith, therefore, sees in the name of Satin an
allusion to the Latin adverb satin, which is a
usual contraction for satisne meaning “really” or
“sufficiently” in interrogative sentences.
The second part of the episode portrays the
ruler of the place: the monstrous allegorical fig-
ure of Ouy-Dire or Hearsay. Among his follow-
ers are mentioned great names from ancient and
modern times (Herodotus, Pliny, Marco Polo,
Jacques Cartier, etc.). For most critics since
Verdun-L. Saulnier (Jean Céard, Daniel Ména-
ger, Paul J. Smith, etc.), the episode deals with
problems of ecphrasis and items such as scien-
tific (ir)reliability and usefulness, direct obser-
vation versus the practice of borrowing from au-
thoritative authors. Some critics argue that the
episode’s style and content are very different
from those of Rabelais’s other books, and
therefore they (Glauser, and recently, Fontaine)
tend to consider this episode as inauthentic.
Readings: Alfred Glauser, Le faux Rabelais ou De

l’inauthenticité du Cinquième livre (Paris: Nizet,
1975); Verdun-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans
son enquête. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquième livre
(Paris: SEDES, 1982); the articles of Jean Céard, Paul
J. Smith, Daniel Ménager, and Marie Madeleine Fon-
taine, in Le cinquiesme livre, ed. Franco Giacone (Ge-
neva: Droz, 2001).
Paul J. Smith
SATIRE (SATYRE) As even its spelling sug-
gests, the origin and definition of this genre
caused some confusion in the sixteenth century.
The “printer’s discourse” of the second edition
of the Satyre menippée (1594) summarizes the
diverse influences that had combined throughout
the century to accentuate the inherent hybrid
character of a genre predestined to absorb vari-
ous influences: (1) A poem criticizing someone’s
public or private vices in the tradition of Luci-
lius, Horace, Juvenal, or Persius. (2) Any piece
of writing stuffed with diverse ingredients and
arguments, composed in a mixture of prose and
verse, comparable to a side dish of salted ox-
tongues. Varro referred to it as farce. (3) The
Greek satyr-play featured lewd, half-naked satyrs
on stage, pretending to be semi-gods taking the
liberty to attack and insult anybody in rather ex-
plicit fashion.
All these disparate traditions blend into Ra-
belais’s treatment of satire, with an apparent shift
from the culinary heritage of Roman satura and
the explicit vulgarity of the satyr-play dominant
in Pantagruel to more elaborate and subtle ver-
sions of satire prevalent in the Third and Fourth
Books. The importance of the farce in the first
chronicle (1532) seems largely attributable to the
prominent status of Panurge and Alcofrybas,
who determine the text’s overall orientation. Al-
cofrybas’s vigorous yet comic assertions of truth-
fulness (“to any point short of the stake”) accom-
panying his fantastic tales and Panurge’s verbal
virtuosity and public humiliation of his hypo-
critical and pseudo-erudite victims are all ex-
amples of a rather crude brand of farcical satire,
whose targets are easily discernible.
The Third Book witnesses a more intellectual
brand of satire, which demands the reader’s col-
laboration to unfold its full impact and is
therefore susceptible to a plurality of meanings.
This development had seen its beginnings in
Satire 223
Gargantua, particularly in the prologue and the
Enigmatic Riddle (59), two chapters that deal
explicitly with questions of interpretation. The
disappearance of Alcofrybas and the diminishing
status of Panurge serve as main indicators of the
shifting satirical orientation of the Third and
Fourth Books. Starting with the paradoxical
Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4), a common feature
of Menippean satire, the verbal fireworks that
accompanied Panurge’s earlier farcical exploits
no longer meet with Pantagruel’s approval and
thus become ineffective. In the Fourth Book,
even Frère Jean and Epistémon criticize their
companion’s behavior on multiple occasions, for
example in the episodes of the tempest (18–24),
the whale (33–34), and the Andouilles or Chit-
terlings (35–43). Pantagruel even fails twice to
recognize Panurge. The farce is thus discredited
together with its main representative, who, in the
final scene of the Fourth Book, finds himself in
the same embarrassing position as his former vic-
tims: covered in excrement after a rather harm-
less trick played by Frère Jean. This scene con-
firms Epistémon’s earlier complaint, in the
Papimanes episode, where Homenaz’s farce
gives him diarrhea (51).
The new brand of satire that dominates the
Third and Fourth Books generally follows the
Menippean tradition and revolves around ambi-
guity and the plurality of interpretative possibil-
ities. The Third Book’s central question of Pan-
urge’s marital future illustrates this endeavor.
Panurge desperately looks for an authority that
would provide a reassuring definitive answer to
an inherently ambivalent question. He blindly ig-
nores his personal responsibility to know him-
self, which is spelled out several times, especially
in the Her Trippa episode (25), where Panurge’s
severe criticism of the astrologer’s lack of self-
knowledge actually amounts to involuntary self-
satirization. Throughout the text, we see more lo-
calized illustrations of the text’s elaborate satire:
for example, in the intellectual banquet at the
center of the Third Book (29–36) which not only
replaces the previous predominantly culinary
banquets, but also—thanks to Pantagruel’s ex-
emplary interpretation (35)—provides a model
solution to Trouillogan’s paradoxical advice
and, by extension, Panurge’s dilemma. Similarly,
the Judge Bridoye episode (39–43) hints at var-
224 Scatology
ious, mutually exclusive satirical interpretations,
ranging from the judge’s contemptible use of
dice and his useless accumulation of scholastic
erudition to the criticism of the highest courts
and the entire judicial system. These factors are
even reflected in Pantagruel’s speech in defense
of Bridoye. Moreover, the final verdict remains
a mystery, owing to the giant’s premature de-
parture, which, in true Menippean fashion, puts
the burden of interpretation on the reader.
We see similar strategies in the Fourth Book,
widely considered Rabelais’s most satirical text.
The radically Menippean tendencies are some-
what toned down in favor of a more straightfor-
ward religious satire, particularly in the “Papi-
manes” episode (48–54), strongly influenced by
the 1551 Gallican crisis. Homenaz, like Panurge,
involuntarily satirizes himself, the Decretals, and
his entire cult, thus challenging orthodox author-
ity and dogmatism in true Menippean fashion. It
is therefore not primarily erudition that charac-
terizes the satire but rather the techniques of
composition as well as hermeneutic implications.
Throughout the Fourth Book, the interpretation
of most episodes proves problematic. The farces
of Dindenault and Basché as well as the en-
counters with disturbing monsters, enigmatic
“thawing words,” and strange peoples all call on
the readers’ input, which might be the Menip-
pean satire’s main contribution to the overall ori-
entation of the text, echoing and fulfilling the de-
mands of the most controversially discussed
chapter: the prologue to Gargantua.
Readings: W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam.
Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1995); Pascal Debailly, “Le
rire satirique,” BHR 56 (1994): 695–717; Gérard De-
faux, “Rabelais, le Quart Livre et la crise gallicane de
1551: Satire et allégorie,” Rabelais agonistes: du rieur
au prophète (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Bernhard Fabian,
ed., SATVRA. Ein Kompendium moderner Studien zur
Satire (Hildesheim, NY, 1975); John W. Jolliffe, “Sa-
tyre: Satura: SATYROOS,” BHR 18 (1956): 84–95;
Marie T. Jones-Davies, ed., La satire au temps de la
Renaissance (Paris: Touzot, 1986); Claude A. Mayer,
Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance française (Ge-
neva: Slatkine, 1984); Bernd Renner, “Du coq-à-l’âne
à la ménippéenne: le mélange comme expression lit-
téraire de la satire rabelaisienne” Ph.D diss. Princeton
University, 2000.
Bernd Renner
SCATOLOGY The study of excrement. If Ra-
belais enjoys an enduring popular reputation, it
has most often been attributed to the happy fic-
tion of Maı̂tre François as a “beuveur tresillustre”
(illustrious drunkard), or a “goutteux trespre-
cieux” (beloved victim of gout), and the like. The
Rabelaisian narrator lavishes these epithets on
his intended readers and incarnates them in the
chronicles’ heroes and villains, but early on they
indelibly colored the portrait of the author him-
self. The epicurean, lucianic, juvenalian Rabelais
and the inhabitants of Utopia and France eat as
copiously as they drink, and expel, whenever and
wherever possible, even more abundantly. More-
over, they perform all of these too-human func-
tions using the most unblushing, frank vocabu-
lary then current, setting a benchmark for all
subsequent Western authors from Jonathan Swift
to Antonine Maillet. It could be argued that Ra-
belais invented the excretory or scatological arts
in literature—that is, the representation of piss-
ing, shitting, farting, sneezing, spitting, belching,
and vomiting—or at least brought them to their
fullest flowering.
The most celebrated passages concern the
child Gargantua’s prescient use of the experi-
mental method to arrive at the perfect “torchecul”
or asswipe (G 13); the diluvian showers of piss
used to play a prank on rubbernecking Parisians
(G 17), to humiliate a Haughty Parisian Lady
(P 22), and to massacre invading Dipsodes (P
28); Pantagruel’s and Panurge’s emetic effect
on many whom they encounter (P 6, 19), as well
as their own intestinal difficulties, whether con-
stipation (P 33) or the reverse (4BK 18); and the
windy isle of Ruach, whose inhabitants “do not
shit, do not piss, do not spit” but who, in fair
exchange, “fizzle, fart, and belch copiously”
(4BK 43). Interestingly enough, Rabelais’s atten-
tion to the scatological and to its efficacy as a
literary device seems to have waned in the dec-
ade or so between the publication of Pantagruel
(1532) and Gargantua (1534) and the Tiers livre
(1546), as the declining number of scatological
episodes—though not necessarily references—

suggests. Because of the comparatively greater
popularity of the first two books in the chroni-
cles, however, the impression of Rabelais as a
joyous and unabashed scatolog persists.
In his marked enthusiasm for “bathroom hu-
mor” he was actually not, it must be noted, ex-
ceptional among contemporaries, nor did he rep-
resent a departure from many of his predecessors.
The scabrous and the scatological were the stock-
in-trade of the vernacular medieval fabliaux, fa-
cetiæ, farce, and mock-epic traditions, so
adroitly exploited by Panurge and Frère Jean
and so evidently appreciated by the indulgent gi-
ant princes they serve. Marguerite de Na-
varre’s relatively circumspect Heptaméron,
composed in the 1540s but published posthu-
mously in 1558, includes more than one such in-
cident, as do Noël du Fail’s Propos rustiques
(1547) and Bonaventure Des Périers’s Nouvel-
les récréations et joyeux devis (1558). All of
them are indebted to such earlier collections fea-
turing excremental episodes as the fifteenth-
century Cent nouvelles nouvelles and Giovanni
Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron.
Moreover, the tradition, already irrevocably as-
sociated with the adjective “Rabelaisian” by cen-
tury’s end, continued unabated in the works of
Étienne Tabourot des Accord, whose Escraignes
dijonnoises (1588) are made up almost exclu-
sively of scatological anecdotes, Cholières,
Théophile, Sorel, Scarron, and others.
Rhetorical mud- or shit-slinging also has a dis-
tinguished history in the polemical battles of the
Reform years, among Catholics and Protestants
of all stripes, in both Latin and the ascendant
vernaculars. Fixated on the defining ingestive act
that was the mass, even before Rabelais’s death
in 1553, anti-Catholic critics delighted in follow-
ing the Host through the digestive tract, reaching
perhaps an apogee in Conrad Badius’s Christian
Satires of Papal Cuisine (Satyres chrestiennes de
la cuisine papale [1560]). In this vein, both Gar-
gantua (G 30) and Panurge (3BK 25) repeat
versions of the anticlerical soubriquet “maschem-
erde” (shit-eaters) in reference to clerics who
hear confession; and both Gargantua and the
Fourth Book incorporate strategic send-ups of
these doctrinal food-fights in the episodes of the
bakers, or “Fouaciers de Lerné” (G 26⫹), as well
Scatology 225
as adventures on the islands of Tapinois (4BK
29–32), Farouche (4BK 35–42) and of the Gas-
trolatres (4BK 57–62). However much scatolog-
ical discourse was part and parcel of the “gros
rire gras” (big belly laugh) of Gallic humor, it
proved of service—and here Rabelais was as
much beneficiary as innovator—in debating is-
sues of higher importance via recourse to lowly
metaphors.
In discussing what many critics take to be the
more serious “design” of Rabelais’s chronicles,
his predilection for the excremental has often
proved problematic. Mikhail Bakhtin’s highly
influential reading of the carnivalesque in Ra-
belais, which reached European and Western ac-
ademic readers in translation in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, offered one solution to that
problem—or, rather, attempted to show the prob-
lem itself to be something of an historical fiction.
Bakhtin’s work even foregrounded the impor-
tance of the “material bodily lower stratum” in
efforts to interpret the author and his era. Bakh-
tin’s “discovery,” as Samuel Kinser encapsulates
it, is that “it is no longer possible . . . to treat Ra-
belais’s ‘low,’ popular aspects as incidental décor
to an essentially elite masterpiece” (254). Con-
sequently, and in fitting concert with the rise of
microhistory and cultural studies, interest in both
restating and reinstating the scatological in Ra-
belais, together with the obscene and other fea-
tures long thought inconvenient and incidental,
has grown. The resulting labors include such
painstaking fieldwork as Claude Gaignebet’s ex-
haustive studies of scatological folklore and its
survival, as well as Edwin Duval’s and others’
reintegration of the “high matter” of Rabelais’s
evangelical humanism into the “low manner” of
its expression, and vice versa. The scatological,
what was perhaps most popular (or regrettable)
about Rabelais’s works, has come to be taken
most seriously.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Boston: MIT Press,
1968); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991); Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens.
L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Samuel Kinser, Ra-
belais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of California
226 Scholasticism
Press, 1990); Jeff Persels, “ ‘Straightened in the Bow-
els,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defeca-
tion,” ER 31 (1996): 101–12.
Jeff Persels
SCHOLASTICISM “The learning of the
schools,” a mode of thought and discourse that
developed in the twelfth century from the recov-
ery of logical works of Aristotle previously un-
known in the West. Adopted by all universities
in Europe, it revolutionized the world of learning
in medieval Europe by investigating things by
their genus, species, differences, properties, and
accidents, and by promoting exhaustive discourse
about them using the nine categories of quantity,
quality, relation, position, place, time, state, ac-
tion, and affections. Applied to the various sci-
ences, its dialectical method of discerning the
true from the false opened up new avenues of
learning and therefore seemed to make the world
less mysterious and chaotic. From its beginning,
however, scholars who preferred the classical ap-
proaches of the trivium and quadrivium opposed
scholasticism. They argued that the structured
methodology of scholasticism precluded the use
of eloquent language and that it substituted “con-
fusing perplexities of causes” for study of the
Bible, its patristic commentators, and classical
authors. Despite such opposition, scholasticism
swept all before it for the next four centuries. In
theology, the scholastics categorized and system-
atized the whole gamut of doctrinal and ethical
questions. Its best and most famous expression
was the Summa theologiae (1266–73) of the Do-
minican theologian Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274),
in which all issues concerning God, creation, and
morality were exhaustively investigated through
logical discourse. A great artist like Dante used
the scholastic method in his political treatise
Monarchia. The brilliant Franciscan Duns Scotus
invested his works with a new vocabulary that
humanists like Erasmus would call barbarous.
In the later Middle Ages, scholasticism in-
creasingly stressed method and structure over
content. Some scholastics such as Jean Gerson
warned that theology was becoming a purely
speculative science that neglected its practical
application to the Christian life. The rival schools
of Realism and Nominalism, each with sub-
schools proposing nuanced variations, quarreled
among themselves. In the print era, they pro-
duced for university classrooms numerous works
of logic, many of them variations of the Summule
of Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI, d. 1277). Edi-
tions of and commentators on the theological
works of Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns
Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and other scholastics
followed its strict methodology.
Not unaware of inherent problems and possi-
ble abuses in their science, scholastics neverthe-
less defended the value of speculative theology
in the curriculum, while always submitting it to
the ultimate authority of Scripture and tradition.
Contrary to common belief, their quarrel was not
with the humanists’ promotion of the studia hu-
manitatis but with their campaign to eliminate
scholasticism from the curriculum. Against the
humanists’ charges that scholasticism neglected
the Bible and was unable to discover or correct
errors in its text, the scholastics countered that
divine revelation was fixed and closed, and that
the humanists’ philological tampering with the
Vulgate text in use for so many centuries was
not merely dangerous but also blasphemous. This
issue alone accounted for most of the incidents
of censure and criticism exchanged between
scholastics and humanists.
The scholastics believed that their systematic
method of resolving questions according to di-
alectical principles was unquestionably more cer-
tain and valuable in an age of controversy than
the admittedly more elegant but unsystematic ap-
proaches of the Fathers of the Church, whom the
humanists sought to promote and substitute for
medieval scholastic theologians. For both hu-
manists and scholastics, therefore, there was too
much at stake to compromise, and each side
painted the other in caricature. Humanists lam-
pooned scholastics as ignorant buffoons. Rabe-
lais satirized them throughout his works, notably
ascribing ridiculous titles to their books (see P 7,
the fictive catalogue of the library at the Abbey
of Saint-Victor in Paris). Scholastics like the
Parisian theologians Noël Béda and Pierre Cous-
turier equated humanists with blasphemers and
heretics. Ironically, a balance between scholasti-
cism and humanism was best achieved by a man
of unexceptional intellectual standing but of solid
piety and organizational skills: Ignatius Loyola,
whose legacy in Jesuit schools later helped

spread both scholastic theology and humanist
teaching methods throughout Europe.
Readings: Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of
the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); James K.
Farge, “Erasmus, the University of Paris, and the Pro-
fession of Theology,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook
Nineteen (1999): 18–46; Erika Rummel, The
Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and
Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996); Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism
and the Unification of Europe 1: Foundations (Oxford
and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).
James K. Farge
SCIENCE Concluding “Of Cripples” (Essays
3.9), Michel de Montaigne tells how Aesop, on
sale with two other slaves, responded to their
buyers’ inquiries. Hearing his companions extol
how much each “knew this and that,” Aesop
avowed he knew nothing. Montaigne deduces
that the pride of those who attribute to man the
capacity to attain “every thing” causes others to
opine that he is capable of “no thing.” Some have
extreme faith in science where others have the
same in ignorance. True science is related to
doubt, and hence is borne by conscience. The
essay sums up a view that Rabelais had exposed
in Pantagruel (8) where Gargantua writes to his
son, “science without conscience is the ruin of
the soul.” At stake is a method of inquiry whose
user recognizes that truth may be an undiscov-
ered error.
The same letter contains a kernel of Rabelais’s
sense of science. Gargantua has just praised the
young century in which new light shines. Pan-
tagruel is emerging from the recent darkness in
which his father had been raised. “The time was
still in shadows, and still felt the infelicity and
calamity of the Goths, who had led all good lit-
erature to destruction” (P 8). Now that the art of
printing has restored and circulated ancient lan-
guages everyone can become learned. “I see brig-
ands, butchers, adventurers, stable boys of today
wiser than the men of knowledge and preachers
of my time” (P 8). Inspired by what he sees at
the sunset of his own life, he tells his son how
best to acquire wisdom.
The program equates science with cosmogra-
phy, the study of the workings of the whole of
Science 227
nature. The student must learn languages fault-
lessly: Greek (via Plato), Latin (via Cicero), He-
brew, Chaldaic, and Arabic, respectively. He
must pursue the liberal arts, avoiding astrology
by embracing astronomy, and also immerse him-
self in civil law. He must dedicate himself with
curiosity to nature, “so that there be neither sea,
river, nor spring whose fish you do not know; all
the birds of the air, all the trees, shrubs and sap-
lings of the forests, all the grasses of the earth,
all the metals hidden in the belly of the abysses,
the gems of the entire Orient and the South: may
nothing be unknown to you” (132). He must then
“carefully revisit the works of the Greeks, of
Arab and Latin writers without condemning Tal-
mudists and kabbalists; and, by frequent anato-
mies, acquire a perfect knowledge of the other
world, which is man” (132–133). Every day he
must “visit”—attend, read, dialogue with—the
New Testament and the Letters of the Apostles
in Greek, and then the Old Testament in Hebrew.
“Somme, que je voye un abysme de science”
(“In sum, may I see an abyss of science” [P 8]).
The statement is an illumination, an epiphany,
and a vision: science is an abyss, and an abyss
is science. Implied is that science cannot be re-
duced to an object of itself. It remains a relation
with the unknown, a bottomless chasm in which
we plunge to find new knowledge and from
which we return and enter into over and again.
Science is gained from the fruits of travel, curi-
osity, and application. It is equated with move-
ment into and out of things, and with continual
creation and self-perpetuation. After his epiph-
any, he tells his son: “for now that you are be-
coming a man and getting big, you will need to
emerge from (issir de) this tranquility and repose
of study, and learn chivalry and arms in order to
defend my homeland and to keep secure our
friends in their affairs” (133). He needs to im-
plement everything he gained from living and
learning with his teachers. Here issir is reiterated
for a third time in the letter, ostensibly to indicate
how emergence endows science with a politics
of action.
Human nature, intones Gargantua, perpetuates
itself through the extended family. The Pauline
truth is confirmed in a genealogy that ties
Grandgousier to Gargantua, and Gargantua to
Pantagruel: “What is done by our lineage (issue
228 Shakespeare
de nous) in legitimate marriage” (P 8) alleviates
the burden of original sin. In his long life, Gar-
gantua has delighted in reading Greek masters
(Plutarch, Plato, Pausanias, and Atheneus) “while
waiting for the hour when it will please God by
creation to call and order me to exit from (issir
de) this earth” (P 8). Issir de signals movement
in different directions, beginning from what is
here and now (ici) and leading to what issues
from licit generation from human congress.
Whether in life or death, the human subject
passes into and out of a world under the guidance
of God. When Pantagruel is asked to leave the
tranquil space of study to defend his family and
country, he emerges from the formative matrix
of an abysme de science to protect the right to
procreate and to study and learn of the world.
Emergence leads to action taken in time of emer-
gency.
If science is an abyssal relation with the un-
known, and if it results with an emergence of
humans into and out of the world, it also figures
as a mirror that reflects the good actions of hu-
man agents. Gargantua treats his passing not as
a finality of death, but as a journey “from one
place to another” insofar as he remains a visible
image in and of his son and his doings. In the
knowledge and virtue he invests in Pantagruel,
Gargantua will leave his son “as a mirror repre-
senting the person of me your father” (P 8). The
biblical metaphor is aimed in the direction of
cosmography, a science that will be seen doubly
reflected in the terrestrial sphere and in “the other
world,” that of the human body revealed by anat-
omy.
Spelled out in this crucial chapter is a credo
of science affecting what follows in the other
books. Pantagruel suddenly embraces the un-
known (Panurge) after he had recently shunned
it (in the person of the Ecolier Limousin, or
Limousin student). In Gargantua the eponymous
prince, learning how not to waste an hour of the
day, is portrayed going “into secret places” to do
his daily excretions while his preceptor reads
scripture to him, “exposing . . . difficult and ob-
scure points” (G 23). He endlessly “issues” from
closed spaces into the light of day. He burrows
into rocky crannies and plunges into “abysses
and chasms” (G 23), and he visits the “grassy
places,” the trees and plants of his environs, with
the aid of scientific books. In the Third Book the
colloquists hear and debate the knowledge of an
array of specialists, while in the Fourth Book
they visit the islands comprising an archipelago
of a deformed nature, a world seen as a scatter
of singularities.
In each book the relation with science changes.
Confidence and joy about the world in Panta-
gruel give way to mobilization of knowledge in
Gargantua, while the Third Book affiliates sci-
ence with doubt, and the Fourth Book calls into
question any cohering or redemptive trait asso-
ciated with learning. Great writers are defined by
their sum of different, often conflicting, paradox-
ical creations that call one another into question.
Such, too, is the relation of Rabelais to science
in its passage from a wondrous abyss to action,
doubt, and fear. In all the books science, as Mon-
taigne later confirms, is a companion of con-
science.
Readings: James Bono, The Word of God and the
Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Mod-
ern Science and Medicine (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1995); John Henry, The Scientific
Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); P. L. Jacob, Science
and Literature in the Middle Ages, and at the Period
of the Renaissance (New York: D. Appleton and Co.,
1878); David Lindberg and Robert Westman, Reap-
praisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990).
Tom Conley
SHAKESPEARE Evidence that Shakespeare
read Rabelais is suggestive, if uncertain. The pe-
dantic Holofernes in Loves Labors Lost seems
related to Pantagruel’s tutor Holoferne, but
when in Two Gentlemen of Verona (1.1.136–
138) and The Tempest (1.1.25–29) a man terrified
of drowning is told he will live to be hanged
(1.1.30–36; 4BK 24), Shakespeare may be dram-
atizing the proverb “he that is born to be hanged
shall never be drowned.” Similarly, although the
phrase “the beast with two backs” (Othello
1.1.117) appears in Rabelais, it is not his inven-
tion. An excited Rosalind in As You Like It asks
a flurry of questions and demands the answer “in
one word” (3.2.327–339). When her friend re-
plies, “You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth
first,” memories of Rabelais would suit the play’s

tendency toward Menippean satire, but the first
audience would probably have recalled the hero
of a lost French chapbook translated circa 1567.
Stronger evidence that Shakespeare enjoyed Ra-
belais’s sexual humor and bravura rhetoric is a
speech by the clown in All’s Well that Ends Well
(1.3.37–45) that resembles Frère Jean’s consol-
ing celebration of cuckoldry (3BK 28; the play’s
cynical Parolles, moreover, is a nastier Pan-
urge).
These and other parallels cannot be true inter-
textual gestures, for few theatergoers can have
read Rabelais before he was partially translated
in 1653. More significant may be the two writers’
ambivalent appreciation of Erasmian folly, car-
nival reversal or festivity, and the utility to wise
kingship of morally problematic and foxy cun-
ning. Shakespeare invents compelling fools for
Twelfth Knight and Lear, but his best Panurge is
Falstaff, cowardly thief and seedy gentleman
trickster with a liking for paradox, taverns, and
satirical performance: a panourgos. Unlike Pan-
urge, he will be disowned by his master in 2
Henry IV with a chilling Lenten rebuke (“I know
thee not, old man,” 5.5.45) that hints at the price
a purified warlike regality pays when uninflected
by mercurial folly. Pantagruel, Shakespeare may
have reflected, loved Panurge all his life—but in
Utopia, not England.
Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English
Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1933); Margaret Jones-Davies, “Paroles intertextuel-
les: Lecture intertextuelle de Parolles,” Collection As-
traea 1 (Actes du colloque All’s Well That Ends Well
[Montpellier, 1985]): 65–80; Cathleen T. McLoughlin,
Shakespeare, Rabelais, and the Comical-Historical
(New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Anne Lake Prescott,
Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Ha-
ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); B. J. Sokol,
“Holofernes in Rabelais and Shakespeare and some
manuscript verses of Thomas Harriot,” ER 25 (1991):
131–35.
Anne Lake Prescott
SIBYL (3BK 16–18) In the Third Book, chap-
ters 16–18, Panurge follows Pantagruel’s ad-
vice and consults the Sibyl of Panzoult to learn
whether he is fated to be cuckolded if he marries.
The episode fits into a series of consultations that
explore the limits of human knowledge and of
Sibyl 229
Panurge’s folly. Among the many resonances of
the episode are the place of prophecy in a Chris-
tian view of history, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century educated men’s distrust of women who
pretended to knowledge. Panurge and Episté-
mon, who visit the Sibyl together, display the
range of male reactions to such women: Panurge
ranges between ignorant, mystified fear and base-
less optimism, while Epistémon moves from in-
itial misogynistic dismissal of the idea that
women can teach anything worth knowing to an
apparent conviction that the Sibyl of Panzoult is
a worthy companion of Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl,
who led Aeneas to the Underworld and showed
him his posterity (Aeneid, book 6). The modern
French woman’s abject poverty and decrepitude
and Epistémon’s reactions to her suggest a vari-
ety of lore about witches (old, ugly, solitary,
poor) that circulated among both learned and il-
literate contemporaries of Rabelais. In fact, ex-
cept for her age, the Sibyl of Panzoult more re-
sembles contemporary stereotypes about witches
than she does classical or early Christian descrip-
tions of the Sibyls.
The Sibyls, usually described as ten in num-
ber, were ancient pagan prophetesses who, ac-
cording to certain Fathers of the Church (partic-
ularly Lactantius, a.d. c. 300), were divinely
inspired to predict the coming of Christ and de-
scribe his true divinity. The Erythraean Sibyl was
supposed to have predicted that the earth would
“sweat” at the birth of Christ, a detail Rabelais
copies in describing conditions at the birth of
Pantagruel (P 2). Christological prophecies of the
various Sibyls were recorded in apocryphal
Greek Sibylline Oracles between the second cen-
tury b.c. and the seventh century a.d., and were
polemically invoked by Jewish and Christian the-
ologians. Early Christian writers, notably Lactan-
tius and Augustine, passed them to Latin and
even vernacular writers of the Middle Ages.
Christian infatuation with the Sibyls as prophetic
witnesses of Christ was reinvigorated in the fif-
teenth century, when Neoplatonic philosophers
such as Marsilio Ficino sought confirmation of
Christian truth among supposed pre-Christian pa-
gan writers such as Hermes Trismegistos (the
thrice-great). (In reality, the texts were produced
in the early centuries a.d., and show the influ-
ence of the new religion—hence their seemingly
230 Sileni
marvelous and prophetic confirmation of its doc-
trines.) In Rabelais’s era, Hermes and the ten
Sibyls appeared together in the inlaid pavement
of Siena cathedral (1480s) as prophets of the In-
carnation.
Readings: Peter Dronke, Hermes and the Sibyls:
Continuations and Creations (Inaugural Lecture De-
livered March 9, 1990) (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990); D. P. Walker, The Ancient The-
ology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the
Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duck-
worth, 1972).
Walter Stephens
SILENI (G PROL) These grotesquely carved
boxes containing precious substances, immedi-
ately compared to Socrates’s ludicrous appear-
ance and divine wisdom, form the opening meta-
phor of the prologue to Gargantua. Although the
image initially appears to provide a set of instruc-
tions for interpretation, the exhortation to seek
a plus hault sens or higher meaning is compli-
cated by the evocation of problems of authorial
intention and imposition of meanings foreign to
the spirit of the work. In referring to Homer and
the Ovide moralisé (a fourteenth-century trans-
lation of the Metamorphoses which presented
Ovid’s tales of seduction as Christian allegories),
the prologue affirms that allegories need not be
deliberately inscribed to be legitimate, but cau-
tions against excessive manipulation of a text in
order to extract a redemptive meaning (see Al-
legory). This questioning of medieval allegoret-
ical practices in favor of individual contempla-
tion (with its inherent risk of misinterpretation)
was closely linked to the intellectual upheaval of
the Reformation. The prologue to Gargantua
emblematizes this massive shift in interpretive
practices.
Moreover, the Sileni image enacts the pro-
logue’s status as the product of reading and in-
terpretation. Rabelais juxtaposes close transla-
tions from Erasmus’s adage Sileni Alcibiadis
with the reinscription of elements of Plato’s Sym-
posium absent from Erasmus, notably a comic
tone and references to drunkenness, thereby as-
serting the work’s humanist credentials and sub-
tly conferring prestige on the prologue’s narra-
tive stance. The tension between the grotesque
and the sublime, and the use of the prologue to
problematize rather than clarify authorial inten-
tion, make the prologue to Gargantua one of the
most frequently annotated passages in Rabelais.
Critical disagreement remains as to whether the
prologue points toward a clear, accessible mean-
ing (whether Christian humanist or comic) or a
plural text that resists unifying interpretations.
Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Michel Jeanneret, Le
défi des signes (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994); Raymond
La Charité, “Rabelais and the Silenic Text: The Pro-
logue to Gargantua,” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book,
ed. La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).
Jennifer Monahan
SKEPTICISM Critical comment on skepti-
cism in the literature of the Renaissance in gen-
eral, and certainly on its influence on the works
of Rabelais, has been bedeviled by a semantic
confusion that should be addressed at the outset
of any such discussion. The trouble lies in the
fact that the word skeptic in English and other
modern European languages has two related but
entirely separate, almost opposing, meanings.
These, according to Webster’s dictionary, are (1)
an adherent of the classical philosophy called
skepticism, and (2) an incredulous person. The
best way to avoid mixing the meanings up is to
capitalize the first of them. The Skeptic believes
that all mental pain and trouble result from
adopting erroneous dogmatic opinion, and that
since all knowledge is based on sensory percep-
tion and all the senses are demonstrably fallible,
there is no certain knowledge. Thus we will
reach ataraxia—a state free from trouble—if we
suspend judgment on all contentious issues. In
order to get through life’s contingencies as agree-
ably as possible, however, the Skeptic will fol-
low undogmatically the general rules of societal
behavior. In order to eradicate dogmatic opinion
in himself and others, he will “oppose appear-
ances to appearances,” using his reason to antir-
ationalistic ends, arguing that snow is black and
that fire freezes, if he finds it expedient to do so.
The skeptic with a small s, on the other hand,
has a visceral hatred of being deceived, and in
order to avoid such displeasure he refuses to ac-
cept assertions he finds unlikely before submit-
ting them to logical and above all sensory veri-

fication—the opposite, in many ways, of
Skeptical procedure.
Rabelais, toward the end of his life and espe-
cially just after his death, had the reputation of
being a skeptical mocker cast in the mold of Lu-
cian, who was certainly one of his inspirations.
Certain recent critics have taken a directly con-
trary line, seeing him as a “full Christian skep-
tic,” meaning that he used the techniques of
Skeptical argument to further the cause of his
Christianity. In other words, he is said to be a
fideist, fideism being defined as the conviction
that religious truth is accessible only to faith and
not to demonstration by reason, which it is
therefore advantageous to undermine. Neither of
these judgments would appear to be tenable.
Although everyone admits that Rabelais was a
ferocious mocker of certain aspects of popular
superstition, and above all of what he considered
to be unjustifiable religious conservatism, few
critics would now accept the notion that Rabelais
was a fundamentally incredulous man: a died-in-
the-wool skeptic. Such an attitude is hard to rec-
oncile with Christianity in general, for the be-
liever must ring-fence his articles of faith from
the corrosion of his doubt. But there are further,
quite unassailable, grounds for denying the title
of skeptic to this author. His Christianity is un-
orthodox to the extent that it is strongly tinged
with Neoplatonic magic, which suffuses the plot
of the Third Book and is a major element in the
Fourth, to the extent that there—uniquely—he
lays aside his authorial persona to tell his readers
of the effect on him of the prodigies he had wit-
nessed at the deathbed of his patron Guillaume
du Bellay: of the heavenly signs and portents
preceding the demise and of the prophecies ut-
tered by the dying man, all of which the author
has seen come to pass.
Even less evidence exists to support the thesis
that he was a Christian Skeptic in the sense of
being a fideist. It is true that fideism was in the
contemporary air, that Giovanni Pico della Mi-
randola had exploited the newly available Sex-
tus Empiricus to fideist ends and thus stimulated
interest in ancient Skepticism, and that Henry
Cornelius Agrippa was doing much the same
around the time when Rabelais was writing.
However, the only time Skepticism of any sort
appears in Rabelais, either directly or indirectly,
Social Class 231
is in chapters 35 and 36 of the Third Book, in
which the perplexed Panurge consults the sup-
posed wisdom of Trouillogan, the Skeptical phi-
losopher, who gives him the most infuriatingly
slippery series of answers imaginable. If the an-
swers are considered coolly, making allowances
for their cryptic language, they do indeed convey
a sensible if prosaic message, easily decoded by
Pantagruel, although quite opaque to the in-
creasingly maddened Panurge. Rabelais gives the
final word on the matter to the very authoritative
figure of Gargantua, who expresses in no un-
certain terms his disapproval of philosophers
who do not talk straight. It is pretty safe to as-
sume that the old giant’s opinion mirrors that of
his creator.
Readings: Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief
in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais
(1942; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of
Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Ren-
aissance (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press, 1992); Richard Popkin, History of Scep-
ticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
Max Gauna
SOCIAL CLASS The notion of social class
evolved dramatically in France during the time
spanned by the four books that Rabelais is
known to have written (1532–52). French society
still respected the medieval divisions of the three
estates. A person’s activities therefore continued
to define social status. Military service and lib-
eral spending, for example, helped distinguish
the noble from the commoners who relied on
manual labor to survive. Bloodlines reinforced
these group identities. As new professions, relig-
ious tensions, and financial difficulties devel-
oped, however, class became increasingly
aligned with the wealth that could buy nobility
and the education that offered access to power
and to an elite culture.
The critic Mikhail Bakhtin read Rabelais’s
fiction as a celebration of social change and used
it to illustrate his theory of the carnivalesque.
More recently, however, many critics have found
that Renaissance notions of popular culture
and the evolution of Rabelais’s four books sug-
gest a much more socially conservative author.
232 Sophists
The first book, Pantagruel, contains the most nu-
merous elements of a distinctly popular culture.
As peasant revolts and religious violence chal-
lenged traditional social structure, Rabelais’s lit-
erary world focused more and more on the edu-
cated, nonnoble group to which he belonged,
eliminating references to the urban poor and por-
traying increasingly resigned peasants and au-
thoritative monarchs. In the Third and Fourth
Books, suspicion of the “peuple” also translates
into a discrediting and emasculation of Panurge,
the agent of social disorder from the first book.
All four books, nonetheless, provide examples
of a tension between Rabelais’s understanding of
social class as alternately indicative of the moral
strength or decay of a community. On the one
hand, Rabelais promotes an evangelical leveling
of society where all play a role in God’s design
and are endowed at once with human dignity and
plagued by moral fallibility. This vision inspires
two recurrent themes: communal reciprocity and
the denunciation of class pretension. Throughout
his works, Rabelais depicts enlightened mon-
archs cognizant of their duty to their subjects (G
28). Among the band of merry Pantagruelistes,
Prince Pantagruel relies as much on the help of
his followers as they benefit from his leadership
(P 25, 4BK 19–22). Rabelais’s well-intentioned
Christian kings also reject the self-imposed slav-
ery of those they vanquish in favor of a mutual
respect (P 28, G 50) and consider their servants
their good friends or “bons amys” (4BK 3). The
social markers of wealth and birth do not deter-
mine the constitution of good Pantagruelistes,
but rather an attitude toward life.
Those whom Rabelais’s books target with the
most malice tend to be privileged members of
either a growing professional class or of the
lesser nobility. Panurge (whose own social ori-
gins are deliberately ambiguous) revels in hu-
miliating the wealthy and the powerful. His tricks
focus on the symbolic trappings of privilege that
ostentatiously express a sense of superiority (lux-
urious clothing, for example [P 16]). Panurge’s
strategies of social resentment reappear in Epis-
témon’s description of Hell (P 30) where the
privileged in this world are humiliated by menial
jobs in the next while the formerly disempow-
ered assume positions of power.
In the utopian Abbey of Thélème, even showy
apparel is redeemed since everyone wears the
same fabrics and colors (G 56). But the equity
in Thélème applies only to artistocrats. This elite
utopia suggests the degree to which Rabelais
does in fact maintain and even reinforce a rigid
social hierarchy in his books. In many ways, the
evangelical royalty of Rabelais’s fiction continue
to represent a traditional aristocracy. Military
honor and largesse take priority over all other
earthly pursuits. A credulous and violent major-
ity seem to require their leadership. The forces
of good prevail thanks to military discipline and
respect for authority (G 47). Commoners who es-
cape personification as superstitious fools (4BK
prol., 46) know their place in society and resist
any temptation to improve it. Even Panurge re-
mains a faithful servant to Pantagruel and seeks
to bolster his own social status by beating pages
(P 16).
Perhaps the most serious threat to communal
harmony proves to be the women in Rabelais’s
fiction. With the exception of Thélème, they are
excluded from the activities and virtues that
serve to validate men’s social status and can only
demote men (P 31, 4BK 10).
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); Gérard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers
livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 113 (1976): 163–80;
Richard M. Berrong, Every Man for Himself (Sara-
toga, CA: ANMA Libri & Co., 1985); and Richard M.
Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986).
Emily E. Thompson
SOPHISTS A Greek term implying an appear-
ance of wisdom. The Sophists were fifth-century
b.c. philosophers criticized by Socrates for their
practical applications of philosophy. Plato’s dia-
logue of the same name pitted Socrates against
Gorgias. Considered derogatory since antiquity,
the term sophist implies a feigning of wisdom
through contentious rhetoric and self-interested
relativism. Rabelais uses it to denigrate a scho-
lastic emphasis on a method of argumentation (in
moda et figura, pro et contra) that subordinates
truth to form. In Gargantua, he parodies the
scholastics through his mockery of the young
princes’ sophistic tutors who strive not for com-

prehension but rote memorization. Their methods
of education not only prevent their pupil from
progressing, but also corrupt his common sense
and confidence. Another self-proclaimed sophist
in the same text, Janotus de Bragmardo, further
illustrates sophism with his pointless arguments,
redundant conclusions, and privileging of selfish
corporeal concerns. Rabelais juxtaposes these
weaknesses with the discipline, lucidity, and sim-
ple eloquence of Gargantua’s humanist tutor,
Ponocrates.
In Pantagruel, Rabelais targets the theologians
of the Sorbonne with the term sophist, simply
replacing “Sobonnicoles” with “sophiste” in later
editions. Identification of diegetic sophists, how-
ever, proves less transparent in Pantagruel than
in Gargantua. Many of the characters display so-
phistic traits while simultaneously proclaiming
their disdain for the same. Pantagruel’s father
urges him to embrace an education that, though
avowedly humanist, recalls the exaggerated
claims of the sophists. Pantagruel himself chal-
lenges a series of theologians, lawyers, and doc-
tors to public debates with no apparent goal be-
yond personal glory and humiliation of his
adversaries.
Only when Panurge enters the narrative does
Pantagruel disentangle himself from the sophistic
temptations, leaving Panurge to carry on the con-
testatory public debates in his stead. Gérard De-
faux argues that Panurge becomes the foil, lib-
erating Pantagruel from the taint of sophistry.
While Pantagruel seeks the truth and acquires the
reputation of a selfless sage, Panurge vainglori-
ously argues through sheer bluff. He displays the
same strategies of intimidation and intentional
ambiguity in verbal as well as nonverbal debates.
During an example of the nonverbal, Thaumaste
and Panurge abandon words in order to escape
the decried sophism, but retain its public postur-
ing and empty bravado. In the Third Book, Ra-
belais makes fewer direct references to sophists
but provides a series of rhetorical duels between
Panurge and Pantagruel and various prophets and
experts. Although Panurge most closely demon-
strates sophistic argumentation with his falsely
confident, contestatory interpretations and his
self-interested relativism, Pantagruel also argues
speciously. The jurist Bridoye uses sophistic ar-
guments in his self-defense, but his caricature
Sorbonne 233
targets a specific legal jargon and moral relativity
as much as it does a philosophical approach.
In the Fourth Book, Rabelais seems much less
concerned with denouncing sophists, retaining
only the most general traits of his satirical por-
traits from the earlier books and scarcely using
the term at all.
Readings: G. J. Brault, “ ‘Ung abysme de science’:
On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s letter to Panta-
gruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Gérard Defaux, Pan-
tagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à l’histoire de
l’humanisme chrétien au XVIème siècle (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Me-
dieval Curriculum, the Scholastic University, and Gar-
gantua’s Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabe-
lais’s Incomparable Book (Lexington, KY: French
Forum, 1986); Michael A. Screech, “The meaning of
Thaumaste,” BHR 22 (1960): 62–72.
Emily E. Thompson
SORBONNE The Faculty of Theology of the
University of Paris which Rabelais satirizes in
his works. The Sorbonne considered itself the
theological authority of France. Its conservative
members, partisans of scholasticism and Aris-
totelian theology, quickly declared themselves
enemies of the new religious influences. To the
Sorbonne, the twin threats of the evangelism
movement and Martin Luther’s popular writ-
ings were not only ruinous for French souls, but
they menaced its own stranglehold on Church
doctrine. In fact, like most of his contemporaries
in the early sixteenth century, the Syndic of the
Sorbonne Noël Béda made no distinction be-
tween Lutheran ideas and evangelical thought.
Indeed, he considered them the same threat,
claiming before Parlement in 1526 that Luther’s
errors entered France mainly through the texts of
Lefèvre d’Etaples, Erasmus, and Berquin
(Erasmus’s translator). One can easily imagine
the ire of Sorbonne theologians as they watched
their monopoly on biblical interpretation be frit-
tered away by access to the Bible in translation.
Evangelicals such as Lefèvre d’Etaples were pro-
viding those very translations and asserting the
Gospel over liturgy and tradition.
Rabelais, too, believed in a living Word over
doctrinal debates. In the eyes of the Sorbonne,
this was the first count against him. But Rabelais
also knew his Greek, which encouraged him to
234 Sporades
side with Hebrew and Greek scholars who pro-
posed exegetical corrections to the Latin Bible,
the Vulgate. Now on the warpath, the Sorbonne
responded by throwing their venerable authority
behind efforts to examine books, censure them,
and pursue their authors with the aid of Parle-
ment. They were not always successful, particu-
larly in the case of Rabelais who had powerful
protectors in the du Bellays, also enemies of the
Sorbonne. Nevertheless, the Sorbonne put Ra-
belais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel on their first
list of prohibited books in 1542, the Third Book
in 1546–47 and the Fourth Book in 1552.
The Magistri nostri of the Faculty of Theol-
ogy, with their protracted academic disputes and
vain hair-splitting, began to look outmoded. It is
against this very stodginess that Rabelais
launched his attacks on the Sorbonne in Gargan-
tua and Pantagruel. In the 1533–34 editions of
Pantagruel, Rabelais came out with raised fists
against the Sorbonne and in the process cham-
pioned the cause of the du Bellays (whose iren-
ism did not sit well with the Magistri nostri). The
Sorbonne’s most prominent figure, Noël Béda,
bears the bulk of Rabelais’s joking. Hunch-
backed and lame, Béda had been depicted as a
monster by Parisian students. On the Library of
Saint-Victor’s shelves, Béda is the author of
some ridiculous titles such as On the Excellence
of Tripe (he had quite a belly) and Concerning
Hunchbacks and the Deformed: In Defence of
our Masters of the Sorbonne (P 7). Pantagruel
even kept Sorbonne theologians arguing for six
weeks with his defense of 9,764 theses (P 10)!
The juridical disputatio between Baisecul and
Humevesne (P 10–12) and the theological dis-
pute between Thaumaste and Panurge (P 17–
18) mock scholastic forms and academic vanity.
The penchant for sterile bickering is reinforced
by Rabelais’s changing of “theologian” to “soph-
ist” for later editions of his first two books.
But it was Béda’s special brand of intransi-
gence that made him an easy target for Rabelais.
Indeed, some critics have likened the seethings
and ragings of Picrochole to the Sorbonne’s hot-
tempered Syndic. To be sure, Béda groomed his
horrible reputation among humanists when he led
the charge against Erasmus and repeatedly re-
quested the interdiction of printing altogether.
He had even tried to prevent lectures on religious
texts in Francis I’s showcase for the new learn-
ing, the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux. In Rabe-
lais’s eyes, such a stance made him an obscur-
antist theologian and enemy of letters.
Grandgousier’s praise for his son’s ingenious
arsewipe is to compare him to a “docteur en Sor-
bonne” (G 12), a misguided ambition well borne
out by the lax education he received from former
Sorbonne doctors Holofernes and Bridé. When
sent to Paris, Gargantua fared no better. The
young prankster borrowed the bells of Notre
Dame, provoking an uproar. To get the bells
back, the academic blowhard par excellence Jan-
otus de Bragmardo pronounced a harangue that
Rabelais used to parody Sorbonne jargon (G 16–
19). Afterward, Bragmardo instigates an episode
of infighting that shows the doctors as a vain and
vicious group. In the debacle of the bells of Notre
Dame, critics see a satire of the contemporary
episode where the Sorbonne incited the people
against Gérard Roussel’s evangelical sermons
during Lent in 1533–34. Béda himself was exiled
over the affair. Rabelais called the theologians of
Paris “Sophistes, Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sor-
bonigènes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniformes, Sor-
bonisecques, Niborcisans, Borsonisans, and San-
iborsans.” Whatever you call them, they take it
on the chin in Rabelais’s work as caricatures of
the old, lifeless learning.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches
de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28; Gérard Defaux,
Rabelais et les sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire de
l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: Ni-
jhoff, 1973); Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sor-
bonne (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole
est-il Noël Béda?” ER 8 (1969): 13–25; Raymond
Mauny, “Rabelais et la Sorbonne,” BAARD 3.6 (1977):
252–61.
Amy C. Graves
SPORADES When Pantagruel and his com-
panions reach the Isle of the Macreons, after the
terrible storm at sea, their host, the venerable
Macrobe, informs them that his island is situated
in the Sporades—not the Sporades of the Car-
pathian Sea but rather the Sporades of the Ocean,
formerly subject to the ruler of Great Britain
(4BK 26). This imaginary archipelago, unknown
to ancient or modern science, has aroused a mild
degree of curiosity among the commentators,

who usually refer us to Plutarch, as if he were
some kind of geographer. The whole episode of
the Macreons is widely recognized to derive
from Plutarch’s Pythian dialogue On the Decline
of Oracles, and so we might reasonably expect
to find some reference to the Sporades some-
where in the dialogue. In fact, after Philip the
historian recounts the death of Pan, the gram-
marian Demetrius of Tarsa confirms that several
islands scattered around Great Britain are named
after demons and heroes. The word he uses to
describe the situation of these islands in relation
to the main island is sporádas (419 E), or dis-
persed.
Later in the dialogue, Plutarch’s son Lamprias
admits that he has often spoken on the topic of
oracles, but his religious duties always inter-
rupted and dispersed his conversations, resulting
in “lógous . . . sporádas” (431 D), or scattered
speech. What Rabelais has done, here as else-
where, is to take a common attribute and convert
it into a place name. In this case, the topicalized
attribute is not a human flaw or transgression as
in Tapinois (dissimulation), Farouche (ferocity),
Chaneph (hypocrisy), or Ganabin (theft), but
rather the defining characteristic of a narrative
that disperses or disseminates these places in spo-
radic fashion. In this sense, the episode of the
Macreons or Sporadic Islanders is a paradigmatic
example of Rabelais’s penchant for toponymic
narrative, where the place name is an epitome of
the story. A follower of Cratylus might suggest
that the Sporades is the proper name for Rabe-
lais’s work.
Readings: Jean Fleury, Rabelais et ses oeuvres, vol.
2 (Paris: Didier, 1877); Frank Lestringant, Ecrire le
monde à la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993).
Eric MacPhail
STORM See Tempest
SYMBOLIC SYSTEM People have been at-
tributing symbolic values to the personae, ob-
jects and events of the Chronicles since they
were published. While individual attributions
seem to hit the mark (Picrochole as Charles V,
for example), none of the systems proposed has
proved sustainable against the contradictions that
the text throws up; they are generally simplistic,
one-to-one equivalences that take no account of
Symbolic System 235
the complexities of the Rabelaisian text, and
scholars have in the main abandoned this ap-
proach. Some, for example, Terence Cave, con-
tend that Rabelais’s symbols are largely ludic,
lacking in continuity and subversive in nature;
others, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Claude
Gaignebet, seek the significance of the Chroni-
cles in folklore traditions, and still others, such
as Michael Screech, explore the historical context
of the Reform. However, a complex symbolic
system underlies the Chronicles, defined by de-
liberate contradictions that guide and drive un-
derstanding. Rabelais says as much in describing
the sustantificque mouelle, the substantial mar-
row of his work (G prol), and in insisting on the
need to see in each of the prologues to BK3 and
BK4.
The symbols are most often covert, revealed
in some cases by cryptic clues that confirm the
symbolic identification, sometimes not identified
at all. The only real authentication of the system
and of the individual symbols that compose it is
by the coherence they contribute to the structure
of the works.
The purposes of this covert system are de-
scribed in the rules of allegory; among them one
stands out as obvious. There were ideas in mid-
sixteenth-century France that were dangerous to
hold, and Rabelais is a heretic “up to but not
including the fire.” So although the import of the
symbols and, consequently, the substance of the
text would be readily comprehensible to the
sixteenth-century humanist, the gens de bien or
“good people,” it was intended to be impenetra-
ble to those outside the inner circle. The Chron-
icles are deliberately evasive.
The symbolic system has its roots in Panta-
gruel but is systematically applied in Gargantua
and grows to fullness in BK3, BK4, and BK5.
There are very many symbols, but five principal
ones with their associated trailers are the wine
(and the vines, grapes, bread); the giants and
their retinue; the water; copulation, which un-
derlies the marriage theme and therefore the last
three books; and the resurrected Panurge of
BK3, BK4, and BK5.
The wine is covered in another article, as are
the giants, but a supplement is required to fit the
giants into Rabelais’s system. They appeared on
earth as the direct consequence of the first the-
236 Symbolic System
ological dispute—that between Cain and Abel
which led to the murder of Abel (see P 1 and
Gen. 4:1–16)—and stand in a tutelary role be-
tween humanity and the divine, like Hurtaly sit-
ting on the Ark during the Flood and steering it
to safety with his feet. In this function, Rabelais’s
giants are symbols of the Church, the body of
Christ on earth. There has been a new church for
every generation since Cain (see the Genealogy
in P 1 to which G 1 refers); of the three giants
of the Chronicles, Grandgousier represents the
medieval church and Gargantua the church mil-
itant of the Reform. Pantagruel, in an extension
of the function described for him in P by Edwin
Duval, becomes from BK3 the Church of the
Troubles, protecting the human traveler, Panurge,
on a journey to discover his destiny and, like
Tobias, to resolve the problem of a marriage.
Important in understanding their significance
is the recognition of the Ficinian hierarchy in
which they stand. Figured as the “great Pan,”
Christ is symbolically replicated in the earthly
ideal of Pantagruel, who is in turn replicated on
a lower level in Panurge, his imperfect copy. Be-
low Panurge are a number of the unredeemed at
the level of matter, including the Chicanous, the
Engastrimythes, and the Gastrolatres. A parallel
series may be found in Gargantua where an im-
plicit Christ is replicated in his ideal body on
earth, the giant Church (Grandgousier and Gar-
gantua) which contains in its retinue imperfect
ecclesiastics: Janotus and the monks of Seuilly
on the one hand and Frère Jean on the other.
The shortcomings (αµαρτ␫α) of the first group
are mortal, whereas those of Frère Jean are ve-
nial, the criterion being whether or not the per-
sona does the will of God (⍜εληµα). Frère Jean
with all his faults does, but the other monks and
Janotus do not. The Platonic level of materia is
represented by Tripet (i.e., Guts) and the Pichro-
cholian rabble. The parallel strands of this chain
of being, the personae, the wine/blood, the Logos
and Marriage, come together at the return from
the Divine Bottle (see Bacbuc) to form the con-
clusion of the Chronicles.
The book Gargantua is in a number of ways
parallel to the “Great Allegory” (BK3, BK4,
BK5) and different from it. One of the more ob-
vious differences is the horse symbol. In Gar-
gantua horses are doctrines; the play horses of
the juvenile Church (G 12) are part of the prep-
aration for the battle of Armageddon that will be
fought when Gargantua reaches adulthood, as
also are the equestrian maneuvers of Gargantua
23. Gymnaste in his battle (35) with Tripet
(materialism) demonstrates his mastery on horse-
back. He is the theologian of the band. What then
is the Great Mare? It comes out of Africa, a
Hippo from Hippo—Saint Augustine. Its tail,
that is, what follows—the consequences of Au-
gustinian doctrine—flattens the allegorical Forest
of Meanings (see Allegory) around Orléans,
which harbors the theological quibblers and pests
(frelons) of that city. The horse as a symbol of
doctrine is supplanted in later books by the
woman. But note that the theologian of 3BK 30
is Hippothadée.
Another ubiquitous but generally unobtrusive
symbol marking differences between G and
BK3-5 is the water. Its birth is marked by an
insertion about drinking water into the Thau-
maste episode of Pantagruel (P 18) at some time
between the first edition (1532) and the definitive
edition (1542). It seems to represent the value of
learning in Gargantua. Frère Jean is ignorant,
waterproofed by wine; indeed, the only learning
he has is the drip on the end of his nose. The
piss, too, is associated with ignorance: first the
gawking people of Paris are drowned by Gar-
gantua’s effluvia because they do not understand
the significance of the new Church and take it
for a passing wonder (G 17), while the pilgrims
are inadvertently trapped and put at risk for the
same reasons (38), and the misguided Pichrocho-
lian army drowns when the Great Mare empties
her bladder (36). As for the pilgrims, they are
ultimately saved by their bourdons or staves,
symbolizing their faith, and finally recognize and
are recognized by the giant (38, 45).
In the Fourth Book water takes on the domi-
nant value of the letter (as opposed to the spirit),
or writing. The sea is the sea of writing of all
sorts; the product of many springs, it is undrink-
able, perilous to the pilgrim Panurge by its
storms, but also a source of wonder and adven-
ture. The image of an ocean of writings may be
Talmudic. The pure springs at which the travelers
restock their water supplies are the Scriptures.
The Miracle at Cana when the water was
changed to wine is a leitmotiv of the last three

books and a key to the enigma of the Temple of
the Bottle.
The sex symbol is the only one of the great
symbols to be fully and explicitly identified by
Rabelais in a vitally important text for the mar-
riage theme and the nature of Panurge’s quest—
the Couillatris episode of the Fourth Book’s sec-
ond prologue. By virtue of his name—Poor Little
Prick—Couillatris is identified with the male
genitals, whereas his lost axe-head is specifically
associated by Priapus with the female genitals.
The Neoplatonic poets, particularly Maurice
Scève, figured their beloved as an Ideal. Among
other things, Délie is an anagram of l’Idée, the
Idea. Rabelais reverses the metaphor. The idea,
thought, doctrine, belief, philosophy, becomes
woman. The conmentanom (whatsit) in its essen-
tial femininity is, in the case of the farmer’s wife
in Papefiguière, the power of doctrine, while the
virgin Clerices in Papimania are doctrines not
yet fertilized or promulgated. The man, or the
fecunding principle, represents the mind. As Ju-
piter says to Priapus (BK4, prol 2), “Et habet tua
mentula mentem” (“Your male organ has a
mind”). The couillons or testicles represent the
generative power of the mind, an analogy sup-
ported by the contrasted blazons in the Third
Book (26, 28): Frère Jean’s generative potential
is vigorous, but Panurge’s is failing.
Couillatris, representing the ordinary human
mind, has, in the mental maelstrom of the Re-
form, lost his coignée or axe-head—his “idea” or
belief system. He is given the choice between the
tried and trusty old one and “improved” versions
of gold or silver. If he accepts the old, he is given
the rest; but if he reaches for the silver or gold,
he loses his head. He is the model for the trans-
formation undergone by the mercurial Panurge of
P who has become the pilgrim figure of the last
three books. The story is an allegory of the state
of the humanist Church in the confusions of the
mid-sixteenth century. The old religious beliefs
are being challenged and lost. The bewilderment
of the “ordinary person”—the pilgrims of G—is
taken up in Panurge’s doubts. Panurge is the
questing humanist mind in search of a system of
belief he can hold on to. Rabelais’s counsel to
those in perplexity is to accept the doctrines one
has, and then, in time, one will see new beliefs
added to the old. If the humanist reaches for new
Symbolic System 237
doctrines now, he will figuratively lose his head,
that is, indulge in mad actions, as the religious
factions in the 1540s and 1550s were steadily
doing. Homenaz presents the same lesson to
Frère Jean in the Papimania episode, in a differ-
ent guise, and forms the conclusion to the Bottle
episode and the Chronicles.
The humanist dilemma is summed up in the
issue of marriage. How is the current generation
to avoid the death of its ideologies? In 4BK 26
the physetere represents a species of intellectual
and spiritual death; but it is overcome by the
fleet of the replicate Christ, Pantagruel, drawn up
in a Y formation, the symbol of the human gen-
itals. Copulation between Mind and Idea ensures
a new generation of minds and ideas. We may
compare this notion with the famous letter of
Gargantua (P 8), where physical immortality is
assured by the same means. But how may this
transmission properly take place? The old Pan-
urge was lustful for new ideas. He claimed to
have stuffed 417 Parisian women in nine days (P
15). The new Panurge has been forgiven by Pan-
tagruel, has put off his old lustful ways, sym-
bolized by his codpiece, and in 3BK consults all
the sources of wisdom available about the out-
come of a marriage. His problem is that he is
imperfect; his wife (ideology) will be imperfect,
as is the Church which will sanctify the marriage.
As a consequence, he will inevitably be “cuck-
olded, beaten, and robbed.” Lust being forbid-
den, he must choose between an imperfect mar-
riage with undesirable offspring or continence
and no posterity. His problem is resolved at the
Divine Bottle. As with Couillatris’s gold and sil-
ver axe-heads, and the consummation of the mar-
riages of Papimania’s virgins, all will be given
in time, at Panurge’s/Pantagruel’s/Christ’s return.
Readings: M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,
trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1984); S. B. Bushell, “Rabelais and Chris-
tian Initiation: Allegorical and Typological Motifs in
the Works of Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss., University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979); Terence Cave, The
Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);
Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991);
Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens: L’esotérisme
spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve
et Larose, 1986); Fred W. Marshall, “The Allegory of
238 Syphilis
Rabelais’ Gargantua,” AJFS 24.2 (1987): 115–154;
“The Great Allegory” AJFS 26.1 (1989): 12–51; F. W.
Marshall, “Les Symboles des Allégories de Rabelais,”
BAARD 5.2 (1993): 86–102; F. W. Marshall, The Wa-
ter Symbol in Rabelais: A Study Based on the Three
Central Books (Waikato: University of Waikato,
1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duck-
worth, 1979).
Fred W. Marshall
SYPHILIS (LA VÉROLE) Deadly, sexually
transmitted disease thought to have been con-
tracted by sailors under Columbus and subse-
quently spread through Europe with the help of
mercenaries and prostitutes following various ar-
mies during the Italian campaigns (hence the
term mal de Naples) at the onset of the Renais-
sance. Over the course of thirty years, spreading
from popular classes to the highest ranks of so-
ciety, syphilis or la grosse vérolle had attained
epidemic proportions by the time Rabelais began
work in Lyon. His arrival there coincided with
an important increase in the presence of syphi-
litics in hospital populations, due as much to
their need for care as to the social shunning and
marginalization to which they fell prey. As no
effective treatment was known, a lucrative mar-
ket surfaced for charlatan doctors and barber-
surgeons whose promise of cure in the form of
mercury-filled lotions caused pain and death
more intense and rapid than the sickness itself.
Initially thought to be a form of divine punish-
ment, syphilis was also blamed on women as
perceptions of uncontrolled female lust intensi-
fied with its spread.
Rabelais observed and understood both the
cause and reactions to the new sickness. The fact
that the disease was sexually transmitted only en-
couraged a tendency to see in syphilis divine
punishment for sins of luxure or lust. Fully dis-
gusted with painful and even deadly treatments
offered by unschooled, profiteering charlatans,
Rabelais began his medical career confronted
with an epidemic perceived as nothing less than
a threat to the survival of humanity. Indeed, the
very act that perpetuates life could now destroy
it. In light of the crisis brought on by syphilis,
connections between Rabelaisian textual dedica-
tions to syphilitics and promises of the books’
curative value take on particular significance. His
interest in syphilitics characterizes the totality of
his allegorical production, insofar as they are pre-
sented in each dedication as those to whom the
works are addressed—those who stand to benefit
most from the healing power he promises they
contain. Elsewhere, Rabelais borrows Church
discourse on disease, turning authoritarian rea-
soning about syphilis back on its creators, thus
effecting a critique of hypocrisy while playing
with the theory of syphilis as divine punishment
(P26, 4BK 45). When women and syphilis con-
verge in his texts, the doctor echoes a popular,
male tendency to blame women for the ailment,
while the words and actions of Panurge serve to
unveil masculine lust and rampant promiscuity as
the true causes of the illness (P9, 5BK 15). Hav-
ing endeared syphilitics to himself by inscribing
their condition as the main reason for his healing
attentions, Rabelais borrows in his allegories the
most harmful ways of thinking and talking about
syphilis to encourage the afflicted and indeed all
of us to avoid the dangerous human excesses to
which all are prone and to focus on the superi-
ority of health, longevity, and freedom from sick-
ness and pain.
Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la méde-
cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Lesa
Randall, “Representations of Syphilis in Sixteenth-
Century French Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Arizona, 1999).
Lesa Randall
 T
TAHUREAU, JACQUES (1527–55) Jacques
Tahureau was born in 1527 to a noble family of
Le Mans; he died tragically young, immediately
after his marriage in 1555. He was known in his
lifetime mainly as the author of Petrarchan love
poetry, some hedonistic, erotic, and satirical
pieces, and some serious and rather dark poems
dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre. However,
ten years after the death of the author, his Dia-
logues As Entertaining as They Are Useful (Di-
alogues non moins profitables que facetieux)
were published. They achieved immediate suc-
cess, and by 1602 they had run through an aston-
ishing seventeen editions, after which they fell
into sudden and complete oblivion. In 1870, a
Parisian bibliophile published the first modern
edition of what he considered to be an informa-
tive satire. Another long period of neglect was
followed by considerable scholarly interest, and
a modern critical edition was published in 1981.
Despite phenomenal success in its own time in
terms of published editions, the contemporary si-
lence regarding such success is even more sur-
prising, for apart from the publisher of the first
edition no one mentions it at all. The
seventeenth-century bibliophile Colletet wrote an
article about Tahureau but mentions only his po-
etry. It is at the very least possible that this
strange reluctance to mention the work has a
bearing on the modern debate about its place in
the history of ideas. In short, it is significant be-
cause it seems to attack religious belief in general
and Christianity in particular, and thus to resolve
in a positive way the critical debate that raged in
the twentieth century concerning the very possi-
bility of unbelief during the French Renaissance.
The work’s aggressive rationalism is highly re-
markable because it is based on Epicurean sen-
sory criteria; whatever is pleasurable is good and
rational, whatever is not is bad and irrational. Es-
pecially significant are the sections on magic—
which is simply laughed at—and on religion it-
self, in which Islam in particular is denigrated
for features that also apply exactly to Christian-
ity—a very early example of the technique of
indirection or assimilation, which would become
so important two centuries later. Often compared
to Rabelais for his irreverent wit and satirical
verve, Tahureau composed an epitaph commem-
orating the older writer’s passing shortly before
his own death in 1555. In that work, the young
poet emphasized Rabelais’s penchant for mock-
ing his detractors and for “stinging” those who
stung others (“piquoit les plus piquans”).
Readings: Barbara Bowen, Words and the Man in
French Renaissance Literature, French Forum Mon-
ographs 45 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983);
Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbe-
lief in the Printed Literature of the French Renais-
sance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1992); Jacques Tahureau, Les dialogues: non
moins profitables que facetieux, ed. Max Gauna, TLF
291 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); Jacques Tahureau, Poésies
completes, ed. Trevor Peach, TLF 320 (Geneva: Droz,
1984).
Max Gauna
TARANDE (4BK 2) Marvelous animal, bought
by Pantagruel during his visit to the Isle of Me-
damothi. Like all other persons, paintings, and
animals (unicorn) described in this initial epi-
sode, the tarande is on the edge of reality and
hallucinating fictionality. The animal’s descrip-
tion is a playful collage of Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History 8.34 and C. Julius Solinus’s
Polyhistor 33. Rabelais could have found both
descriptions in the much read Garden of Health
by Johannes Cuba (many editions in different
languages from 1485 on) or in one of the learned
sixteenth-century editions of Solinus. Although
240 Tartareti
mentioned by the ancients, the animal’s ontolog-
ical status remained uncertain at the time of Ra-
belais’s Fourth Book (1552). That is, in 1551,
the authoritative Swiss zoologist Conrad Gesner
hesitated about the animal’s identity; it was only
in 1554 that he identified it with the reindeer.
Belonging to the Arctic fauna, the animal con-
tributes to the Fourth Book’s local color. Because
of his mimicry, it informs the reader on the (sym-
bolic) colors of the characters’ clothes it ap-
proaches: scarlet for Pantagruel, grey for Pan-
urge. The description’s ludic use of zoological
and fictional discourses amused the modern nov-
elist Georges Perec, who in his La vie mode
d’emploi (1978, chapter 4) integrally incorpo-
rated Rabelais’s description of the tarande.
Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une narra-
tion biscornue: le tarande du Quart Livre,” Poétique
et narration. Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, ed.
François Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand
(Paris: Champion, 1993); Conrad Gesner, Historia an-
imalium. De quadrupedis viviparis (Zurich: Froschov-
erus, 1551); Conrad Gesner, Appendix historiae
quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum (Zurich:
Froschoverus, 1554); Paul J. Smith, “Description
et zoologie chez Rabelais,” Description-écriture-
peinture, ed. Yvette Went-Daoust (Groningen: CRIN,
1987).
Paul J. Smith
TARTARETI (TARTARET, TATERET),
PIERRE (c. 1460–1522) Scholastic logician
and theologian born at Lausanne, Switzerland. At
the University of Paris Tartareti took his M.A. in
1484, was rector of the university in 1490, and
earned the license in theology in 1496 (doctorate
1500) at the Collège de Sorbonne. He became
the leading interpreter of the Franciscan scholas-
tic theologian Duns Scotus in Paris and taught
logic at the Collège de Reims. His books on
logic, Aristotelian ethics, and Scotist theology
were popular with many but were viewed as ster-
ile by humanists such as Lefèvre d’Etaples and
reformers like Wolfgang Capito. Tartareti was
one of the busiest teachers in Paris from 1485
until his death in 1522. His membership on the
Faculty of Theology’s commission that con-
demned the writings of Johann Reuchlin (1514)
put him even more at odds with the humanists.
Rabelais showed his distaste for Tartareti by pre-
senting him as the author of a book, De modo
cacandi (How to Defecate) (P 7). His works were
reprinted several times in Venice in the seven-
teenth century.
Readings: Auctarium chartularii universitatis Par-
isiensis, 3, ed. Charles Samaran and Emile Van Moé
(Paris: Delalain, 1935); Peter Bietenholz, Basle and
France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz; and
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Paris,
Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Registre 89; Augustin
Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris (1494–
1517), 2nd ed. (Paris: Argences, 1953).
James K. Farge
TEMPEST, OR STORM (4BK 18–24) A
standard theme found in classical and earlier con-
temporary epics, the life-threatening storm found
in chapters 18–24 of Rabelais’s Fourth Book of-
fers distinctive narrative aspects. Whereas the
storms in stories such as Lucian’s True History
and Folengo’s Macaronées function as initia-
tions into fantastic worlds which then become the
focus of the stories, Rabelais’s storm episode is
at the center—sequentially and, arguably, the-
matically—of the narrative. It also evokes the
biblical storms seen in the Books of Matthew
(8.23–27), Mark (6.45–52), and Acts (27.9–44),
and the storm in Erasmus’s Shipwreck. With this
episode, Rabelais underscores the evangelical
motif of his text by highlighting the varying ex-
pressions of faith of the Pantagruelists when
faced with peril. The extended witty dialogue be-
tween Panurge and Frère Jean lightens the tone
of its serious topic, while the detailed description
of the endangered sails and fittings recall Rabe-
lais’s preference for technical accuracy through-
out his books.
After encountering nine ships on their way to
the Council of Chésil, a reference to the Council
of Trent, the Thalamège is buffeted by lightning
and high winds. Rather than assisting his com-
panions to secure the ship, Panurge crouches in
fear, praying to all the saints and to the Virgin
Mary. He then begs Frère Jean to hear his con-
fession, offers money to anyone who can save
him, and swears to God and various saints that
he will build chapels in their honor if they save
him. In marked contrast, Pantagruel, after
having made a short and pious plea directly to
God, steadfastly mans the rudder. At the height

of the storm, Pantagruel implores the grace of
God, while Frère Jean simultaneously berates
Panurge, resorts to drink, and assists the crew.
Pantagruel offers one last appeal to God, and
suddenly he sights land as well as a clearing of
clouds. The crew, reassured, enthusiastically ad-
justs the sails to reach Macreons Island, while
Panurge continues to cry and snivel.
Pantagruel proclaims that he values Panurge
no less for not having helped during the storm.
He declares that God should be praised for spar-
ing all aboard the Thalamège. Epistémon ex-
plains that he was just as afraid as Panurge, but
that in time of danger a person must pray to God
as well as help himself. Now out of danger, Pan-
urge boasts that as the ship’s hull is only two
inches thick, he is always that far away from
death and is not afraid. Pantagruel, Panurge, and
other crew members reveal their erudition by cit-
ing the ancients’ commentaries on death and
drowning. Eusthenes concludes the storm epi-
sode by declaring that Panurge lives up to the
Lombard expression that once danger has passed,
the saints are mocked.
This episode offers the clearest example in the
Fourth Book of the Thalamège community
working toward a common goal. It stands in stark
contrast to the Fourth Book’s insular communi-
ties which are static and incapable of change.
Thematically, it links the issue of death and man-
ners of dying broached during the visit to Tohu
and Bohu and concluded on the next island vis-
ited, the Macraeons.
Readings: L. Denoix, “Les Connaissances nau-
tiques de Rabelais,” François Rabelais. Ouvrage pub-
lié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort 1553–
1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et
ecriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais (Ge-
neva: Droz, 1987).
Margaret Harp
TEMPÊTE, PIERRE (c. 1480–1530) Princi-
pal of the Collège de Montaigu in Paris. Tem-
pête was born circa 1480 in the diocese of Noyon
(northern France), and died on November 3,
1530. He took the M.A. in Paris circa 1500 and
the doctorate in theology in 1516. In 1514 Noël
Béda selected Tempête to succeed him as prin-
cipal of the Collège de Montaigu, although Béda
continued to exercise considerable direction of
Thalamège 241
college affairs. Tempête held the post until 1527,
when he became a canon of the Cathedral of
Noyon.
In the Fourth Book 21, amidst his recital of
many dangers from “tempests,” Rabelais played
on Tempête’s name, depicting him as a tempes-
tuous pedagogue who beat the students at Mon-
taigu (Montem Acutum): “Horrida tempestas
montem turbavit acutum. Tempeste feut un grand
fouetteur d’escholiers au collège de Montagu.” In
Gargantua 37, Rabelais excoriated Montaigu as
a “louse house . . . from what I know of the cruel
savagery [there]” and added: “Were I the king of
Paris, may the devil carry me off if I wouldn’t
light a fire and burn the place down—and I’d
make sure the headmaster was in it, and the
whole board of governors, too, for permitting
such inhumanity to flourish right under their
eyes” (GP 87). Historians have generally adopted
this view of Tempête propagated by Rabelais and
Erasmus (“A Fish Diet” [1526]), but the Collège
de Montaigu was at this time the second-largest
arts college in Paris and attracted notable stu-
dents, among them John Calvin and Ignatius
Loyola.
Readings: James K. Farge, “Tempete, Pierre,” Bi-
ographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology,
1500–1536 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1980), no. 450: 412–13; Marcel Godet, “Le
collège de Montaigu,” RER 7 (1909): 297–302; Au-
gustin Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris
(1494–1517), 2nd ed. (Paris: Argences, 1953).
James K. Farge
THALAMÈGE The name of Pantagruel’s
ship in the Fourth Book. Described by the nar-
rator Alcofribas (Alcofrybas) Nasier at the out-
set of the Fourth Book, the Thalamège remains
central to the chronicle and becomes, literally,
the vehicle for all narrative development. In
Greek the name signifies a ship with individual
chambers. A ship with individual rooms conjures
up the design of Frère Jean’s Abbey of Thé-
lème, Rabelais’s best-known model of an ideal
community, described at the end of Gargantua
(53). The most apparent similarity between Frère
Jean’s abbaye and Pantagruel’s ship lies in their
names, Thélème and Thalamège. The word thé-
lème, also of Greek origin, means volonté or
“will.” Although dissimilar in meaning, the two
242 Thaumaste
terms are nonetheless homonymic. It is just such
wordplay that dominates Rabelais’s oeuvre. On
both structural and semantic levels, Rabelais
pointedly establishes a parallel between Thélème
and the Thalamège. They are the centers, the for-
mer fixed and the latter mobile, of activity for
Pantagruel and his companions. Although Thé-
lème is the domicile for the adherents of Gar-
gantua’s evangelism, the Thalamège is the ac-
tual home, albeit temporary, of Gargantua’s
son, Pantagruel. Most significantly, they both
serve as model communities to Rabelais’s read-
ers. Their joyful atmospheres stand in contrast to
the funny but often chaotic milieux Rabelais de-
scribes surrounding them.
Contemporary readers may have made another
association with the name Thalamège, as the
Greek word talame signifies “nuptial chamber.”
Specifically, Rabelais’s literary contemporaries
would be most aware of the term from its pres-
ence in the Greek name for a nuptial song, the
épithalème. Evocation of this inherently joyous
genre complements nicely both the celebratory
narrative tone found in the opening chapters of
the Fourth Book and the cheerful outlook of Pan-
tagruel’s community in general throughout the
entire work. As the ultimate goal of the voyage
is to determine whether or not Panurge will ever
reach a nuptial chamber, the deliberate etymo-
logical link between the two terms underscores
the leitmotif of marriage first established in the
Third Book. The theme of marriage, in turn, in-
troduces that of union and community at large.
As a vessel in motion with no fixed position,
the Thalamège becomes a model community that
passes from one static community to another on
its way to find the final “word” of the Holy Bot-
tle. A paradigm of model and inadequate com-
munities establishes itself throughout the narra-
tive with each insular encounter.
Reading: François Rigolot, Poétique et onomas-
tique: L’Exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz,
1977).
Margaret Harp
THAUMASTE (P 18–20) This encounter
forms the last of Pantagruel’s Parisian feats
which validate his intellectual mastery, prior to
the military triumph over the Dipsodes that will
confirm his epic heroism. Thaumaste is an Eng-
lish scholar who, hearing of Pantagruel’s fame,
has traveled far to see it verified in person. Ra-
belais lists several similar journeys undertaken in
antiquity and doubtless recalls his own transal-
pine voyages. By the register of his address to
Pantagruel, Thaumaste identifies himself clearly
as a fellow humanist, and Rabelais uses him as
yet another vehicle of antischolastic satire when
he insists that the planned disputation between
them should use signs rather than words to ex-
press their points, so defying the traditional pro
et contra method. In the event Pantagruel does
not even participate in the debate, which remains
a great public occasion; Panurge undertakes to
replace him in order to spare him further prepar-
atory work and also to allay his fears of being
outsmarted. Thaumaste accepts the substitution
on the grounds that if Pantagruel’s disciple can
satisfy him, then this will automatically substan-
tiate his master’s brilliance. However, instead of
addressing serious matters, the ensuing disputa-
tion is an elaborate piece of dumb-show involv-
ing complicated gesticulations on either side
which play with the conventions of academic in-
terchange. For the most part, however, they mys-
tify the audience (and the reader), the only clear
meanings being the obscene ones decipherable in
some of Panurge’s hand signs. Thaumaste,
having appeared to suffer great stress during the
argument, even to the point of beshitting himself,
nevertheless declares himself satisfied beyond his
expectations on all the points originally troubling
him, promises to publish the details of their dis-
cussions so as to preempt any notion that this has
all been a joke, and thanks Pantagruel with great
courtesy, hoping that God will reward him in like
degree. The scene ends with a riotous dinner and
the narrator’s declaration that Thaumaste’s
book has indeed been published in London.
The main problem facing scholars is the epi-
sode’s precise satiric import. Beyond the stock
antischolastic position, which Thaumaste shares
with Rabelais, he may be identified as an enemy
figure whom the jester Panurge defeats and hu-
miliates. Various corresponding clues indicate
his connexion with cabbalistic thought, to which
Erasmus (Rabelais’s inspiration in so many ar-
eas) was quite hostile (see Kabbala). However
the scene’s conclusion in no way substantiates
this pattern; moreover Thaumaste’s stated motive

in meeting Pantagruel is not to best him in de-
bate, but merely to authenticate his reputation, as
indeed happens, albeit paradoxically. Thaumaste
insists (though perhaps insincerely) that his de-
sire is not to show off but to learn, a desire that
he finally declares, again preposterously, to have
amply fulfilled. One is again struck by the
scene’s theatricality, particularly in that charac-
ters’ words and gestures are presented, even to
excess, but not their thoughts. Rabelais therefore
grants his reader considerable initiative. The
mime sequence may be imagined either as an ac-
tual contest, with Thaumaste’s tremblings and
sweat betokening genuine distress, or as a parody
of one, with Thaumaste clowning along with
Panurge and only defecating because he had in-
judiciously risked a fart as part of the act. Ac-
cordingly, his praise of Pantagruel would come
as a comical response to a nontriumph (let us
recall that the hero has done nothing to deserve
the praise, nor is Panurge his pupil anyway). His
intention is to dispel any doubt that their ex-
changes have been “mocqueries,” a tongue-in-
cheek admission that this is precisely what they
have been. Whatever choice one takes cannot,
however, impugn Pantagruel’s brilliance. As a
hero of Renaissance wisdom, he can succeed
even by proxy and when extending no effort
whatsoever.
Readings: Laurence De Looze, “To Understand
Perfectly Is to Misunderstand Completely. ‘The De-
bate in Signs’ in France, Iceland, Italy and Spain,” CL
50 (1998): 136–164; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of
Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1991); Armine Kotin, “ ‘Pantagruel.’ Lan-
guage vs. Communication,” MLN 92 (1977): 691–709;
Ion Muraret, “La Critique de la rhétorique des
sophistes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Analeli Univer-
sitatii Bucuresti 45 (1996): 13–19; John Parkin,
“Comic Modality in Rabelais: Baisecul, Humevesne,
Thaumaste,” ER 18 (1985): 57–82; Michael A.
Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979).
John Parkin
THÉLÈME, ABBEY OF (ABBAYE DE THÉ-
LÈME) Gargantua gives the Abbey of Thé-
lème to Frère Jean as recompense for his part
in the Picrocholine War. The episode has been
variously characterized as the foundation of an
anti-abbey statement, a locus of satire, a uto-
Thélème, Abbey of 243
pia or its more theologically loaded variant, a
terrestrial paradise, a courtly model, or a school
of preparation for marriage. These readings
need not be mutually exclusive.
The Greek name Thelema declares that the
will of God rules in this abbey satirically con-
trasted to other monastic establishments which
remain “de ce monde” or “of this world,” mock-
ing the failures of walls and mechanical rules to
restrain human will. Thélème mixes men and
women, has no walls, no fixed rules, no poverty,
and no expectation that the residents (who enter
the abbey between the ages of ten and fifteen for
women, twelve to eighteen for men) will spend
their whole lives there.
The architecture of the abbey seems to refer to
extant buildings and to have numerological im-
plications. Rabelais’s edition of Giovani Marli-
ani’s Topography of Ancient Rome (Topographia
antiquae Romae) is contemporaneous with Gar-
gantua. Several real buildings constructed in the
first third of the sixteenth century have been sug-
gested as models for the abbey: Bonnivet’s châ-
teau, Francis I’s new châteaux at Chambord, his
château de Madrid in the bois de Boulogne, Ser-
lio’s reconstruction of the port at Ostia, the châ-
teau de Concressaut in Berry. At the center of
Thélème’s courtyard is a fountain, influenced by
an illustration in the Dream of Polyphilus (Hyp-
nerotomachia Poliphili), where the Graces sup-
ply “eau vive,” metaphorically, the living Word.
The recurrence of six in the abbey’s architectural
scheme invites numerological inquiries: the ab-
bey is hexagonal, is six stories tall, and has six
staircases; there are six libraries; the residents
speak six languages, and so on. Six, the product
of the male two and female three, is associated
with earthly perfection (creation completed in six
days) and with marriage (Augustine, City of God
11.30; Philo, De Opificio mundi ch. 3).
Commentators have tended to assume that be-
cause we are told they may marry, all Thélémites
will do so, a reaction encouraged by the evan-
gelicals’ pro-marriage position and by reformers’
suggestions that monastic establishments be
turned into schools preparing young people for
Christian marriage. From this some see Thélème
as the prototype of such an institution. Others see
marriage as the moment of departure from Thé-
lème’s terrestrial paradise. Thélémites are bien
244 Thenaud, Jean
nés, innately good. The courtly setting marks the
Abbey as a spiritually noble place. Its inhabi-
tants’ rich dress mirrors their spiritual and intel-
lectual riches. Odor and the two other nonmater-
ial senses, sight and hearing, are privileged in
Thélème. In contrast to their prominence else-
where in Gargantua, eating and drinking have
little importance; they are included in a list of
things indifferent to salvation to be freely chosen,
like sleep and work, and cited as an example of
communal will. This communal will holds the
Thélémites until such time as they decide to
marry, when the subservience of wife to husband
would interrupt the harmony of the community.
The foundations of the abbey contain an “En-
igme en prophetie” or Enigmatic Prophecy, Ra-
belais’s appropriation of a poem by Mellin de
Saint-Gelais, written as a description of a tennis
game. With minor additions the poem is made
into a description of the course of Christian sal-
vation and concludes Gargantua. André Tournon
convincingly connects it to the spirit of the ab-
bey, as a realm of Christian perfection that nei-
ther Gargantua nor Frère Jean will enter, no more
than Moses entered the promised land.
Readings: Michael Baraz, “Rabelais et l’utopie,”
ER 15(1980): 1–29; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin,
“L’Abbaye de Thélème et le temple des rhétori-
queurs,” Rabelais pour le 21e siècle, ed. Michel Si-
monin, ER 33 (1998): 241–48; Max Gauna, “Fruitful
Fields and Blessed Spirits or Why the Thelemites
Were Well Born,” ER 15 (1980): 117–28; Mireille Hu-
chon, “Thélème et l’art stéganographique,” Rabelais
pour le 21e siècle, ed. Michel Simonin, ER 33 (1998):
149–60; Giles Polizzi, “Thélème ou l’éloge du don: le
texte Rabelaisien à la lumière de l’Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1987): 39–59; Jean-Yves Pouil-
loux, “Notes sur l’abbaye de Thélème,” Romantisme
1.2 (1971): 200–204; Bettina Rommel, Rabelais
zwischen Mündlischkeit und Schriftlichkeit: Gargan-
tua: Literatur als Lebensführung (Tübingen: Nie-
meyer, 1997); Marian Rothstein, “Gargantua: Agape,
Androgyny and the Abbaye de Thélème,” FForum
26.1 (2001): 1–19; Jerome Schwarz, “Gargantua’s De-
vice and the Abbey of Theleme: A Study in Rabelais’
Iconography,” YFS 47: 232–42; Michael A. Screech,
Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979);
Emile V. Telle, “L’ile des alliances ou l’anti-
Thélème,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; André Tournon,
“L’Abbaye de Thélème,” Saggi e ricerche di lettera-
tura francese 26 (1987): 199–220.
Marian Rothstein
THENAUD, JEAN (1474?–after 1542) Fran-
ciscan theologian and scholar at the service of
the French royal family. On the instigation of
Louise de Savoye, Thenaud made a pilgrimage
to the Holy Land (1511–13), of which the rela-
tion (Voyage d’outremer, c. 1530) is his only
work printed during his lifetime. His other works
are published as precious manuscripts, destined
for the private use of the royal family. His first
known work is La Marguerite de France (1508–
9, dedicated to Louise de Savoye). His Triumph
of Virtues (Triumphe des vertus [1517–18]) is a
monumental encyclopedian allegory, written for
the instruction of Louise’s children: the future
king Francis and Marguerite. This text, in
which Thenaud presents himself as the narrator,
contains the first French translation of Eras-
mus’s Praise of Folly. For Francis I, he wrote
two treatises on the kabbala, one in verse and
one in prose. His last known work is Généalitic
de la très sacrée majestée du Roy très chestien
(1533).
Although Rabelais mentions Thenaud only
twice (besides a brief mention in one of the lists
of the manuscript version of the Fifth Book), re-
ferring to his Voyage d’outremer in his descrip-
tion of the longtailed sheep (G 16), modern crit-
ics (L. Sainéan, Schuurs-Janssen) have found
several intriguing lexical resemblances between
the two authors. For Marie Holban, Frère Jean
is a comical persiflage of the historical Jean
Thenaud. Among numerous thematic resem-
blances between the two authors, Anne-Marie
Lecoq noted a giant called Gargalasua in an
anonymous lucianic text, which Lecoq attributed
to Thenaud. For P. J. Smith and T. J. Schuurs-
Janssen, Nazaire, the name of one of the char-
acters of Thenaud’s Triumphe des vertus, pre-
sented as the humoristic, younger friend of the
narrator, refers to Rabelais. (Nazaire is related to
Rabelais’s anagram Nasier: both names can be
derived from the Latin name Nazarius.) This hy-
pothesis implies that the intellectual and succes-
ful Thenaud could have functioned as a mentor
for young Rabelais during his Franciscan years,
of which almost nothing is known.

Readings: Marie Holban, “Autour de Jean Thenaud
et de frère Jean des Entonneurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65;
Anne-Marie Lecoq, “La grande conjonction de 1524
démythifiée pour Louise de Savoie. Un manuscrit de
Jean Thenaud à la Bibliothèque nationale de Vienne,”
BHR 43 (1981): 39–60; Lazare Sainéan, “Jean Then-
aud et Rabelais,” RER 8 (1910): 350–60; Titia J.
Schuurs-Janssen, intro., Jean Thenaud, Le Triumphe
des Vertuz. Premier Traité. Le Triumphe de Prudence
(in collaboration with René E. V. Stuip) (Geneva:
Droz, 1997); Paul J. Smith and Titia J. Schuurs-
Janssen, “ ‘Plus feal que ne fut Damis a Appoloneus.’
Rabelais et Jean Thenaud avant 1517: quelques hy-
pothèses,” Rabelais au Poitou, ed. Marie-Luce De-
monet (in press).
Paul J. Smith
THIRD BOOK (TIERS LIVRE) A sequel to
Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532), the
Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of
Good Pantagruel (Tiers Livre des faicts et dicts
heroı̈ques du bon Pantagruel), first printed in
Paris in 1546 by Chrétien Wechel, is generally
considered Rabelais’s most complex and learned
book. The first of the novels to appear under the
author’s name, it was immediately banned by the
Sorbonne, despite being protected by a royal
privilege and dedicated to the king’s sister, Mar-
guerite de Navarre. Contrary to what the title
leads us to expect, the Third Book is not cast in
an epic mold, and it offers little in the way of
heroic deeds performed by the giant Pantagruel.
The protagonist of the novel is Pantagruel’s
comic double Panurge, whose indecision as to
whether or not to marry, along with the attendant
question of whether he will be cuckolded, trig-
gers the series of consultations with various or-
acles, prophets, and authorities. The novel stands
apart from the other books in Rabelais’s cycle
both in the breadth of its erudition, manifest in
the wealth of references, anecdotes, and exam-
ples drawing on all spheres of Renaissance
knowledge, and in its hybrid form, a Lucianic
mixture of philosophical dialogue and comedy
analyzed by Michael A. Screech and by Mireille
Huchon in the Pléiade edition of Rabelais’s
works. The Third Book consists mainly of mon-
ologues and dialogues involving two or more
characters, onto which are grafted a variety of
Third Book 245
other genres, such as paradoxical encomia, bla-
zons and counter-blazons, maxims, and poems.
The symmetrical design of the Third Book has
attracted much scholarly attention. Edwin M. Du-
val sees the book as a set of concentric frames
at the center of which lies the answer to Pan-
urge’s dilemma. While the initial chapters, deal-
ing with the government of Dipsodie, form a
transition and ensure narrative continuity be-
tween the Third Book and Pantagruel, the final
chapters prepare the voyage in quest for the Di-
vine Bottle or Dive Bouteille which is the sub-
ject matter of the Fourth Book. The paradoxical
Praise of Debts in the opening chapters of the
book (3BK 3–5) is aesthetically balanced by the
panegyric of the marvelous herb Pantagruelion
(3BK 49–52). The allusion to marriage and Mo-
saic law (3BK 6), where Panurge announces his
desire to marry, also has its counterpart in the
disquisition against unsponsored marriages,
where the issue of Pantagruel’s marriage is first
raised (3BK 48). The series of consultations that
lies between these two sets of frames begins with
divinatory methods in the episodes of the Vir-
gilian lots, the dream, the Sybil of Panzoust, the
deaf-mute Nazdecabre, the dying poet Ramin-
agrobis (3BK 9–23) and ends with the counsels
of learned representatives of the higher faculties,
the theologian Hippothadée, the doctor Rondi-
bilis, and the skeptic philosopher Trouillogan
(3BK 29–36). The advice of the fool Triboullet,
interwoven with the episode of Judge Bridoye,
brings the procession to a close (3BK 39–46). At
the heart of these two series of consultations, en-
closed by the twin counsels of Epistémon and
Frère Jean, lies the interview with the suspect
diviner and cuckold Her Trippa (3BK 25),
whose self-love and inability to “know himself”
mirrors that of Panurge.
According to a principle of repetition and var-
iation, most episodes consist in an exposition of
the particular method of divination by Panta-
gruel, at whose instigation nearly all the consul-
tations take place, followed by an account of the
consultation itself and its interpretation. The ver-
dict invariably reached by all but Panurge, who
interprets the oracles and counsels in a manner
favorable to the fulfillment of his desires, is that
Panurge will marry and that his wife will make
him a cuckold, rob him, and beat him. Panta-
246 Thirst
gruel, the Christian-Stoic sage who embodies the
spirit of charity, has traditionally been seen as
opposed to Panurge, whose chief vice is identi-
fied at crucial points with philautie or self-love,
an Erasmian notion that has been the object of
numerous studies in connection with the Third
Book. More recently, critics have sought to re-
habilitate the character of Panurge, pointing out
that his interpretations are just as valid as those
of Pantagruel and his companions. This reading
is favored by the essential ambiguity of the
words and signs put forward by the various
prophets and authorities, as well as by the dia-
logical form of the book. Pantagruel and Panurge
would thus be complementary rather than anti-
thetical figures.
Critics have also varied in their assessment of
the subject of the Third Book. Abel Lefranc fa-
mously saw the book as an episode in the con-
temporary querelle des femmes, linking the
theme of marriage at the heart of the Third Book
to the debates that opposed feminists and anti-
feminists in France at the time. Others have ques-
tioned this reading of the novel, arguing that
marriage is merely a way to address the problem
of predestination and man’s ability to determine
his future, which they see as the dominant pre-
occupation in the Third Book. The two issues are
in fact indissolubly linked. Panurge’s indecision
about marriage and his fear of cuckoldry, as well
as being a comic device, enables Rabelais to en-
gage in many contemporary medical, legal, the-
ological, and philosophical debates surrounding
women. Other important aspects of the Third
Book to which studies have been devoted are the
question of Christian and learned folly, variously
embodied by Panurge, Triboullet, and the judge
Bridoye; Pantagruelism; the different methods
of divination surveyed in the novel; the interpre-
tation of verbal and nonverbal signs; Panurge’s
sophistry and his linguistic agility; and the pe-
culiar admixture of comedy and erudition that
characterizes the Third Book.
Readings: Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges.
L’insolite au XVIe siècle en France (Geneva: Droz,
1977); Lance Donaldson-Evans, “Panurge Perplexus:
Ambiguity and Relativity in the Tiers Livre,” ER 15
(1980): 77–96; Edwin M. Duval, “Panurge, Perplexity
and the Ironic Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,” RQ
36 (1982): 381–400; François Rigolot, Les langages
de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987); Michael A.
Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Ra-
belais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (Lon-
don: Edward Arnold, 1958); M. A. Screech, Rabelais
(London: Duckworth, 1979).
Agnieszka Steczowicz
THIRST The theme of wine and drink, in-
spired by unquenchable thirst, appears more than
fifty times throughout each of Rabelais’s four
complete books. Rabelais signals its importance
with the very name of his principal protagonist
Pantagruel who, Rabelais explains, born during
a moment of record drought, deserved a name
meaning “all thirst” as everyone thirsted at the
moment of his birth as well as because he would
be a future ruler of the thirsty. Indeed, Pantagruel
gains the title of king of the Dipsodes, or “the
thirsty,” when he conquers them during his battle
with Anarche or Anarchy. With this name, Ra-
belais evokes another Pantagruel, the little de-
mon featured in medieval mystères who throws
salt into the mouths of sleeping drunkards. Ac-
cordingly, Pantagruel the giant often awakens a
thirst in others. After Pantagruel seizes a pedantic
Limousin by the throat so that he might at last
speak naturally, the unfortunate scholar suffers
an unquenchable thirst that kills him years later
(P 6) (see Ecolier Limousin). Upon joining Pan-
tagruel’s enlightened court, Panurge attributes
his new insatiable thirst to Pantagruel (P 14).
The theme of thirst serves as a principal source
of comedy for Rabelais: he devotes numerous
passages and even entire chapters to the banter,
jokes, and escapades of the happily drunk (G 5).
Increasingly through his epic, however, the con-
sumption of wine becomes a metaphor for the
thirst of life, knowledge, and faith that both his
protagonists and his ideal readers experience. In
the prologues to Gargantua and the Third Book,
Rabelais calls his readers “esteemed drinkers”
(“buveurs très illustres”). The Fourth Book tells
of a voyage undertaken to visit the oracle of
the Holy Bottle. And tellingly, the closing word
of Rabelais’s Fourth Book—the last of the epic
known to be entirely his own—is a call to drink:
“Beuvons!” The Fifth Book’s prologue, ap-
parently written by Rabelais himself, advises his
readers—buveurs infatigables, or tireless drink-
ers—to consume books much as they do

wine. That is, to imbibe but also to digest and
let inspiration, and hence self-knowledge, have
free reign. Reading becomes a drink that one
must consume to quench, albeit fleetingly, the
thirst for knowledge.
Readings: Jean Larmat, “La vigne et le vin chez
Rabelais,” Revue des sciences humaines (1966): 179–
92; Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (De-
troit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).
Margaret Harp
TIRAQUEAU, ANDRÉ (1488–1558) A re-
nowned French jurist, member of the Parle-
ments of Paris and Bordeaux, “le docte Tira-
queau” (P 5) is the dedicatee of Rabelais’s
Medical Letters (1532) and the object of a eulogy
in the prologue to the Fourth Book (1552). Ra-
belais’s friendship with André Tiraqueau dates
back to their formative years at Fontenay-le-
Comte in Poitou, when both belonged to the so-
called cénacle de Fontenay, a circle of humanist
lawyers. It was in the course of their meetings
and discussions that Rabelais acquired much of
the legal learning that frequently surfaces in his
writings. Tiraqueau gained early notoriety fol-
lowing the publication of an expanded version of
On the Laws of Marriage (De legibus connubi-
alibus [1524]), a highly controversial collection
of commonplaces about women to which Rabe-
lais contributed. All references to Rabelais dis-
appear from later editions of the work, leading
some critics to speculate as to why the friendship
suddenly ended. The Third Book (1546) with its
overarching theme of marriage owes much to
Tiraqueau’s recently reedited treatise, especially
the pronouncements made by the theologian
Hippothadée and doctor Rondibilis (3BK 30–
1). For the casting of dice in Bridoye’s trial
(3BK 39–43), foreshadowed by the episode of
the Homeric and Virgilian lots (3BK 12), Rabe-
lais drew on Tiraqueau’s On the Law of Primo-
geniture (De iure primigeniorum) of 1549. The
name of Judge Bridoye’s interlocutor, the mag-
istrate Trinquamelle, evokes Tiraqueau’s Latin
name (Tiraquellus). Although preponderant in
the Third Book, Tiraqueau’s influence lies behind
many examples and anecdotes in Rabelais’s
books, most notably the treatment of eleven-
month pregnancies in Gargantua (3), which is
Translations, Dutch and German 247
largely based on Tiraqueau’s famous Commen-
tary on the Law, “Si unquam” (1535).
Readings: Jacques Brejon, Un jurisconsulte de la
Renaissance: André Tiraqueau (1488–1558) (Paris:
Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937); Enzo Nardi, Rabe-
lais e il diritto romano (Milan: A. Giuffrè Editore,
1962); Charles Perrat, “Rabelais et Tiraqueau,” Bib-
liothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 16 (1954):
41–57.
Agnieszka Steczowicz
TRANSLATIONS, DUTCH AND GERMAN
(16TH–17TH CENTURIES) The first trans-
lations of Rabelais’s works originated from Prot-
estant countries: respectively, the southern Neth-
erlands (especially Flanders, situated on the
borderline between Catholicism and Reforma-
tion, 1554–61), Lutheran Germany (Fischart,
1572–90), England (Urquhart and Motteux,
1653, 1693, 1708), and the northern Netherlands
(Wieringa, 1682).
The Pantagrueline pronostication is the first
work to be translated, although the translations are
only known by title. In 1554 the Gantois printer
Jan Cauweel obtained a privilege for printing a
Pantagruelsche prognosticatie metter prophetie.
According to a recent hypothesis of Jelle Koop-
mans, the “prophecy” mentioned in the title prob-
ably is a Dutch adaptation of the Enigmatic
Prophecy of Gargantua, chapter 58. No copy of
this edition survived, nor that of another edition
printed by Jan van Ghelen II (Antwerp, before
1560) nor the one mentioned in the 1570 Index.
The only text that has come to us in one single
copy is the anonymous Lieripe (Antwerp, 1561,
Royal Library, Brussels), an accurate translation
of Rabelais’s Pantagrueline pronostication,
which, however, leaves out any mention of Rabe-
lais’s or Pantagruel’s names. Lines from the
Lieripe literally reappear in the Testament rheto-
ricael, a manuscript collection of texts (finished in
1561) by the Brugean poet Eduard de Dene,
which includes many other Rabelaisian borrow-
ings and adaptations, among which is an imitation
of Rabelais’s Library of Saint-Victor (P 7).
Independently from these Flemish translations,
the prolific writer Johann Fischart (c. 1546–90),
living in Protestant, German-speaking Stras-
bourg, translated the Pantagrueline pronostica-
tion in German under the title Aller Praktic
248 Translations, English
Grossmutter (1572). In 1590 he published a Ca-
talogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis, an ad-
aptation of Rabelais’s satirical Library of Saint-
Victor, curiously mixed up with the very serious
and influential Bibliotheca universalis (1545) of
the Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner. Fischart’s most
important translation is Geschichtklitterung
(abridged title; Geschichte ⫽ “story” and Klit-
terung ⫽ “hotchpotch”), a free version of Ra-
belais’s Gargantua. While the first edition
(1575) stays fairly close to its model (except for
some lengthy additions to chapters 3 to 7), the
second edition (1582) is enlarged by massive po-
lemical interpolations, and the third and last one
(1590) is only slightly enlarged, the final version
being almost three times the length of Rabelais’s
original. Fischart’s style is characterized by a
marked preference for the grotesque, ingenious
wordplay, verbal invention, and accumulation,
all stylistic features in which he tries to surpass
his model. His tone is polemic and heavily satir-
ical: as a Lutheran he is not only anti-Catholic,
but also opposes Erasmian humanism (contrary
to the Erasmian inspiration of his model). Be-
cause of his linguistic invention, Fischart is con-
sidered to be the greatest renewer of the German
language of his time. For his English translation
of Gargantua (1653), Sir Thomas Urquhart
consulted Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung, as can
be deduced from the following addition among
many others: whereas Rabelais simply has “I
don’t understand the theoretical” (“je n’entens
point la théorique” [G 5]), Fischart expands: “Ich
verstand dise Redtorich [pun on “Rede” (“dis-
cours”) and “Tor” (“fool”)], Theoric solt ich sa-
gen,” followed by Urquhart who has: “I under-
stand not the Rhetorick (Theorick I should say).”
In 1682, a Dutch translation of all Rabelais’s
works was published by a certain Claudio Gal-
litalo, a pseudonym of the Dutch translator Ni-
colaas Jarichides Wieringa. This translation is the
first one ever to include not only Rabelais’s Five
Books but also the Pantagrueline pronostication
and his letters from Italy. Wieringa’s translation
is very accurate, even scrupulous. He made use
of the recent pseudo-Elzevier edition (1675),
from which he also translated Rabelais’s bio-
graphical sketch and the lenghty linguistic com-
mentaries as well. He also compared this edition
with some older ones and checked his transla-
tions upon the versions of his German and Eng-
lish predecessors Fischart and Urquhart.
Readings: Articles by Dirk Geirnaert, Jelle Koop-
mans, Enny Kraaijveld, and Paul J. Smith in Paul J.
Smith, ed., Editer et traduire Rabelais à travers les
âges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Michael Schilling,
“Einleitung,” Johann Fischart, Catalogus Catalogo-
rum perpetuo durabilis (1590) (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1993); C. L. Thijssen-Schoute and Nicolaas Jarichides
Wieringa, Een zeventiende-eeuwse vertaler van Boc-
calini, Rabelais, Barclai, Leti e.a. (Assen: Van Gor-
cum, 1939); Florence M. Weinberg, Gargantua in a
Convex Mirror. Fischart’s View of Rabelais (New
York: Peter Lang, 1986).
Paul J. Smith
TRANSLATIONS, ENGLISH Although Ra-
belais’s works have been translated numerous
times into English since the seventeenth century,
the two best English translations remain the Ur-
quhart–Motteux translation (1653–93) and
Burton Raffel’s 1990 translation. In 1653, an
English translation by the Scottish writer Thomas
Urquhart (1611–60) of Rabelais’s first three
books was published. Forty years later, Peter
Motteux (1660–1718) revised Urquhart’s trans-
lation and completed his own translation of the
last two books. Even today this joint translation
is available, and it has been included in its en-
tirety in the University of Pennsylvania’s Project
Gutenberg collection of online books. In his
1933 book Rabelais in English Literature,
Huntington Brown pointed out that the Urqu-
hart–Motteux translation had a profound influ-
ence on numerous English writers of the Resto-
ration and during the decades immediately after
the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From a lin-
guistic point of view this translation is somewhat
difficult for modern English speakers to under-
stand because so many words used by Urquhart
and Motteux are no longer in common English
usage, but their translation did make Rabelais’s
five books available to English readers of the late
seventeenth century. Urquhart and Motteux were
somewhat prudish in translating Rabelais’s writ-
ings, but their complete translation still remains
an important text in the critical reception of
French Renaissance literature in England.
Burton Raffel’s 1990 English translation,
which he entitled Gargantua and Pantagruel, is

still in print in both cloth and paperback. This
excellent translation reads very well, and it cap-
tures very nicely Rabelais’s wit, wordplay, and
the different levels of style for the different char-
acters. This should remain the standard English
translation of Rabelais’s works for generations to
come. The original French edition of Rabelais’s
books includes many long lists largely in Latin
such as the catalogue of the Parisian Library of
Saint Victor in the seventh chapter of Panta-
gruel. Burton Raffel correctly understands that
most modern readers of English do not possess
a solid command of Latin and would not appre-
ciate the satirical intentions of many of the fan-
ciful titles in this library. For that reason, Burton
Raffel translated the Latin titles into English,
which makes Rabelais’s satire more accessible to
modern readers. Although one could quibble
with certain translations, such as his translation
of Frère Jean as Brother John and not as Friar
John, because the words “Brother John” imply
that this character is a religious brother and not
an ordained priest, this is a minor defect in an
otherwise excellent English translation, which re-
produces the sharp wit and subtle humor of
François Rabelais.
Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English
Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1933); François Rabelais, Five Books of the Lives, He-
roic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Panta-
gruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux,
1653–93; http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/web
bin/gutbook/lookup?num⫽1200 (accessed August 14,
2003); François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,
trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
Edmund J. Campion
TRAVEL LITERATURE A popular genre in
France long before the Renaissance, travel lit-
erature was perhaps influenced by the new mo-
bility of the European population that was pro-
moted by the Crusades. Villehardouin’s The
Conquest of Constantinople about the Fourth
Crusade, and Joinville’s life of Saint Louis,
whom he accompanied on the Crusade of 1248,
are the prime examples, although they are as
much propaganda and hagiography as they are
travel accounts. Also of importance for Renais-
sance travel writing were the journeys of Marco
Polo (which first appeared in French translation
Travel Literature 249
some time before 1307) and those of Jean de
Mandeville (c. 1356), which were composed in
French, even though de Mandeville claimed to
be an English knight. Travel literature received
a tremendous boost thanks to the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century voyages sponsored by the Por-
tuguese and Spanish monarchies. It is not by
chance that, in Pantagruel, when the young gi-
ant returns to his native Utopia, he at first fol-
lows the exact itinerary pioneered by Portuguese
mariners on their journeys to the Far East, al-
though the final segment is pure fantasy.
The “New World,” however, generated less in-
terest than might be expected in Renaissance
France. According to Geoffroy Atkinson (1969:
10ff), almost twice as many books were pub-
lished on the Mediterranean region and the Mid-
dle East as on the Americas. This can perhaps be
explained by a lack of French colonial involve-
ment in the New World and by a fascination with
and fear of the Turks as the struggle between
Christianity and Islam continued. More recently,
Frank Lestringant has maintained that the greater
interest in the Turkish Empire and the Holy Land
is merely a question of “scale” (échelle), since
the Mediterranean was already well known and
circumscribed by this time, whereas the newly
discovered lands existed in an imprecisely
charted geographic space (12), the immensity of
which Renaissance cosmographers had, at first,
little idea. Subsequently, however, French inter-
est in the New World began to increase, thanks
in particular to the writings of travelers, the most
important being Jacques Cartier, André Thevet,
and Jean de Léry. André Thevet (1516–92), self-
styled cosmographer of four kings (Henry II
through Henry III), was a Franciscan. His first
major work dealt with the Middle East (Cosmog-
raphy of the Levant, 1554), but his 1557 Singu-
larities of Antarctic France was an account of
the French settlement in Brazil, where he spent
less than two months. His final major work was
the Universal Cosmography (1575), which, like
his previous works, was criticized for being little
more than a compilation.
Thevet is often contrasted with the other major
French travel writer of the second half of the six-
teenth century, Jean de Léry (1534–1613). Léry
was a Calvinist minister who wrote his own ver-
sion of the French expedition in Histoire d’un
250 Trent, Council of
voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578). This
work, devoid of erudite references, reads much
more like an eyewitness account than Thevet’s
Singularities, even though it was written some
twenty years after the dissolution of the French
colony in Brazil and so would appear to lack
immediacy. Successive editions attacked both the
authenticity of Thevet’s account and Thevet’s
claim that it was the fault of the Calvinist mem-
bers that the colony failed in 1558. Recent critics,
in particular Lestringant, have presented a more
positive review of Thevet’s work and have
praised its anthropological detail and the impor-
tance it attributes to eyewitness accounts. Others,
however, such as Jeanneret, also emphasize its
preponderantly humanist perspective, pointing
out that Thevet attenuates the shock of the new
by referencing it with what is already known.
Léry is closer to the modern anthropological
point of view in presenting, or purporting to pres-
ent, a simple eyewitness account, without learned
references and “interpretation” of the new culture
in the light of the old. Montaigne’s famous essay
“Les cannibales” was probably influenced by
both Thevet and Léry. Perhaps because of the
interest generated by these three writers and the
progressive engagement of the French in Amer-
ica, travel literature became more and more fo-
cused on the New World. Samuel de Champlain
wrote about his journeys there in 1608 and 1611
and later in the seventeenth century, and the Jes-
uit missionaries produced a body of literature
that provides valuable information on the Am-
erindian civilizations they were attempting to
convert. Thus, by the early seventeenth century,
the Americas had become firmly established at
the center of French travel writing until the locus
of the exotic was shifted to the South Pacific in
the eighteenth century.
Readings: Geoffroy Atkinson, Les nouveaux hori-
zons de la Renaissance française (Geneva: Slatkine
Reprints, 1969); Michel Jeanneret, “1578—Antarctic
France,” A New History of French Literature, ed.
Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994); Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait
en la terre du Brésil, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Li-
vre de poche—Bibliothèque Classique, 1994); Frank
Lestringant, Écrire le monde à la Renaissance (Caen:
Paradigme, 1993), particularly pp. 107–85 devoted to
Rabelais; Frank Lestringant, L’atelier du cosmographe
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); André Thevet, Cosmo-
graphie de Levant, ed. Frank Lestringant (Geneva:
Droz, 1985); André Thevet, Le Brésil d’André Thevet:
les singularités de la France antarctique (1557), ed.
Frank Lestringant (Paris: Chandeigne, 1997).
Lance Donaldson-Evans
TRENT, COUNCIL OF Meeting convened
by the Church in 1545–49 and again in 1551 and
1552 to confront challenges to the mass and the
Eucharist by evangelicals and Reformers. The
net result was a retrenching of Catholic doctrine,
increased factionalism, a confirmation of the
schism with Protestants (Frame 1977), and a step
toward the Counter-Reformation. In his Fourth
Book, during the episode of the Reformist An-
douilles, Rabelais refers to the gathering pejor-
atively as the “concile national de Chesil” (4BK
35)—the national council of fools.
Readings: André Duval, Des sacrements au Concile
de Trente (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985); Donald
Frame, François Rabelais: A Study (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura
TRIBOULLET (TRIBOULET) This charac-
ter, who appears in the Third Book (45), is taken
from the historical name popularized by Victor
Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (1832) and Verdi’s
opera Rigoletto (1851). Triboullet was a popular
name given to professional entertainers such as
those who served Louis XI, Louis XII, and Fran-
cis I. It has been suggested that Triboullet was
also the name of a particular individual, the au-
thor of various farces and sotties (closely related
to the farce, they are short, carnivalesque dramas
in which the central character is a fou or sot
[fool]; topical satire is often included), even per-
haps the author of the Farce de Maı̂tre Pathelin.
The word tribouler means to agitate. A play en-
titled La farce ou sotie des vigilles Triboullet de-
scribes a fictional funeral procession organized
by an acting troupe for Triboullet. Triboullet be-
came a synonym for fool, as well as a name used
in comic theater to indicate a particular type of
comic role.
In the Third Book, Triboullet is the last person
consulted by Panurge, and it is through this en-
counter that Panurge comes up with the idea to
go in search of the Dive Bouteille or the Holy

Bottle. Seven chapters earlier (3BK 38), Panta-
gruel and Panurge expound upon the virtues of
Triboullet in a format that combines the genres
of blason and dialogue. The structure of this di-
alogue opposes Pantagruel, who focuses on ex-
treme or even divine folly, with Panurge, who
opts for a more earthy and material folly in de-
scribing the professional fou. After this theatrical
exchange, the subsequent consultation with Tri-
boullet is delayed for seven chapters with the in-
sertion of the trial of Judge Bridove. When Pan-
tagruel and Panurge finally meet Triboullet,
Panurge’s attempts to explain his situation in
“paroles rhetoriques et eleguantes” (“rhetorical
and elegant words”) is interrupted by the fool
thumping him on the back, giving back the bottle
Panurge had offered him as a gift, and smacking
him on the nose with a pig’s bladder. Pantagruel
maintains that Triboulet is an inspired fool, but
whether Pantagruel’s encomium of the fool is
sincere or ironic is a matter of debate. In the
organizational structure of the Third Book, Tri-
boullet’s placement at the end mirrors the posi-
tion of Pantagruel at the beginning, thus contrast-
ing the wise prince with the foolish fool as each
counsels the hopelessly perplexed Panurge.
Readings: Marie-Luce Demonet, “Le ‘Blason du
fou’ (Tiers livre, ch. 38): binarité et dialogisme,”
L’intelligence du passé (Tours: Université de Tours,
1988); Eugénie Droz, Le recueil trepperel (Paris,
1935); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s
Tiers livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alan
Hindley, “Acting Companies in Late Medieval France:
Triboulet and His Troupe,” Drama and Community:
People and Plays in Medieval Europe (Turnhout, Bel-
gium: Brepols, 1999); Bruno Roy, “Triboulet, Jos-
seaume et Pathelin à la cour de René d’Anjou,” Le
moyen français 7 (1980): 7–56; Michael A. Screech,
Rabelais (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979).
E. Bruce Hayes
TRICKSTER A type of character associated
with diverse folkloric narrative traditions. The
trickster is defined by actions and attitudes that
include deception, trickery, joking, punning,
drinking, gluttony, and even outright malice
against others. Many of the characters in Rabe-
lais’s works possess some of the attributes of
tricksters, most notably the figure of Panurge,
but also Frère Jean des Entommeurs, as well as
Trickster 251
many of the wandering minor characters who
joust with the protagonists, such as Thaumaste
the Englishman (P 19–20), Janotus de Brag-
mardo (G 18–19), Dindenault (4BK 5–8) or any
of a wide range of charlatans who traverse the
work. Rabelais conflates the specific traits of the
trickster, recognizable in figures as wide ranging
as the coyote in American Indian tales, or the
fox in the Roman de renard, with those of the
rogue, the clown, and the fool, which Mikhail
Bakhtin described as belonging to a certain kind
of comic “chronotope.” In Bakhtin’s reading, Ra-
belais’s hybrid version of the trickster operates
within certain spatial and temporal parameters:
he haunts taverns, public markets, festivals, and
even official public ceremonies, such as the
masses Panurge invades with his powders and
parasites (P 16). He is also associated with the
cyclical and cosmic time periods of Carnival
and the harvest, like the bons buveurs who cel-
ebrate Mardi Gras by eating massive amounts of
tripe with Gargamelle and Grandgousier just
before Gargantua’s birth (G 5). While the Pan-
urge of Pantagruel may represent the trickster in
his purest form, especially in the chapter that de-
scribes les moeurs et conditions de Panurge (P
16), the other characters in Rabelais’s work share
only some of these attributes without being fully
devoted to tricksterism.
Panurge as trickster plays an important role in
the development of Rabelais’s works and seems
to represent a particularly puzzling component of
the author’s thought. In the first book, the young
Gargantua is subjected first to a sophist educa-
tion (G 14–15 21–22) and then to a humanist one
(G 23–24), thus exchanging a life of laziness,
gluttony, meaningless games, and scatological
verbal trickery (the poem on defecation [G 13],
the “urinological” etymology of the name “Paris”
[G 17]) for a life of discipline and directed study.
The vertiginous oscillation between these serious
and comic positions, which is typical of the Rab-
elaisian text, in the notorious prologue of Gar-
gantua as in the description of the giant’s dual
education, eventually is personified in the oppo-
sition of Pantagruel and Panurge, the humanist
prince versus the trickster. From a modern per-
spective, it may be difficult to understand why
the learned and disciplined side of Renaissance
thinking, at least in its Rabelaisian variant, was
252 Trouillogan
affixed to a carnivalesque underside that was as-
sociated with Panurge the trickster, whom Ra-
belais retains as a beloved figure and “gentil
compagnon” even after the most repugnant and
misogynistic of episodes, such as the chapters
dealing with the Haughty Lady of Paris (P 21–
22) and the scandalous new method of building
the walls of Paris out of the private parts of
women (P 15).
There is no easy answer to this “riddle of Pan-
urge,” while the following possibilities have been
explored. Most notable among these is the “cos-
mological” and “carnivalesque” answer offered
by Bakhtin, who somewhat naively and optimis-
tically reads the cruel and scatological elements
of Rabelais’s work as belonging to a cosmic
whole, in which positive and regenerative ele-
ments are necessarily linked to negativity, death,
and destruction, which are represented in the
realm of the characters in scatology and violence.
Critics such as Carla Freccero have read Rabe-
lais’s more scandalous chapters as instances of
male bonding accomplished at the expense of fe-
male figures both within and beyond the text, as
in Wayne Booth’s reaction to the Dame de Paris
episode. In this sense, the bond between Panta-
gruel and Panurge mirrored a misogyny that was
an integral part of humanist patriarchy, whose
aporias and problems were explored in depth in
the sixteenth century by Marguerite de Navarre
in the Heptaméron.
Gérard Defaux’s solution to the problem of
Panurge as trickster understands Rabelais’s alter
ego, Alcofrybas Nasier, as a comic mask that
allows the writer to evoke and exorcize the de-
monic elements of his own personality. Hence
these attributes are brought out into the light
through the representation of Panurge in order to
triumph over them. A final solution to this
enigma would be the recognition of Rabelais’s
narrative sources: the learned monk wrote in a
clerical literary tradition that included the insti-
tutionalized misogyny of the exemplary Disci-
plina clericalis as well as the medieval fabliaux,
the learned facetiae, and the Renaissance nou-
velle, in which trickster figures, rogues, charla-
tans, and clowns were ubiquitous. The trickster
in Rabelais’s work is thus a remnant of a long
literary tradition and a representative of a certain
kind of clerical thinking, which he attempts to
characterize, ridicule, and carry forward in an ex-
traordinarily multiple and ambivalent mode of
writing.
Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Chronotope of the
Rogue, Clown, and Fool,” The Dialogic Imagination,
trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984); Gérard Defaux, Rabelais
agonistes: du rieur au prophète. ER 32 (Geneva: Droz,
1997); Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames:
Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel,
22),” JMRS 15.1 (Spring 1985): 57–67; David La-
Guardia, “ ‘Un bon esmoucheteur par mousches ja-
mais émousché ne sera’: Panurge as Trickster,” RR
88.4 (November 1997): 519–28.
David LaGuardia
TROUILLOGAN (3BK 29, 35–36) A philos-
opher whom Panurge consults in the Third
Book. Early in the book, Panurge expresses a
wish to marry but, as he is aging, he fears cuck-
oldry. Torn between wish and fear, he cannot
decide for himself, and the book centers largely
on attempts to resolve his doubts. After several
vain attempts to divine what Panurge’s matri-
monial fate will be, Pantagruel arranges for him
to consult experts: a theologian, a doctor, and the
philosopher Trouillogan. Trouillogan’s advice is
interesting for his philosophy, and also for the
reactions of Panurge and other characters.
In Rabelais, the word “philosophe” usually has
positive connotations. Thus, when Pantagruel
calls Trouillogan a “perfect philosopher,” high
esteem is implied (29). Moreover, because Pan-
tagruel claims here that Trouillogan answers all
uncertainties “assertivement,” that is, “affirma-
tively” or “positively,” we are led to expect clear,
illuminating answers. This expectation is not met
because Trouillogan proves to be an extreme
skeptic, in the manner of the philosopher Pyrrho
of Elis (c. 300 b.c.). He and his followers held
that nothing was certain, and they conveyed this
view obliquely by claiming, for instance, that
propositions were simultaneously true and false,
or things simultaneously existent and nonexist-
ent. (It seems that, for his day, Rabelais was un-
usually well informed about pyrrhonism.)
Initially, when Pantagruel asks Trouillogan
whether or not Panurge should marry, he an-

swers, “Both” (35). When Panurge himself asks,
“Should I marry or not,” he replies, “Neither.”
These answers are not quite as self-contradictory
as they appear: because he was asked which al-
ternative was preferable (marriage or nonmarri-
age), Trouillogan may simply mean that the case
on each side is equally strong or equally weak.
True, the answers are indecisive, but since
Trouillogan is expected to answer “assertive-
ment,” it may be that his answers are as decisive
as they reasonably can be. Certainly, various
characters try to make sense of them. The doctor,
Rondibilis, thinks that they advocate moderation
within marriage, “by denial of both extremes.”
Hippothadée the theologian and Pantagruel
think that they recall Saint Paul’s advice:
“Those who are married, let them be as if they
were not married.” This, too, is a counsel of
moderation, in that excess of marital love puts
the husband in danger of neglecting the love of
God. These convergent reactions indicate that,
for those who know how to interpret them,
Trouillogan’s paradoxes constitute advice, albeit
on marriage in general rather than the particular
case of Panurge.
But Panurge remains dissatisfied. Hoping to
force a clearer answer from Trouillogan by
avoiding questions framed as alternatives, he re-
sumes, “Should I marry?” While the subsequent
dialogue still does not satisfy Panurge, Trouil-
logan offers one more major point. Asked, “What
should I do?” he replies, “What you will.”
Though Panurge reacts angrily, clearly thinking
this response mere evasion, it is in fact good ad-
vice. Just as Pantagruel had done (10), when
Panurge first raised the question of marriage,
Trouillogan is advising him that he must make
his own decision. After another two pages of
frustration, Panurge forgets his resolve to avoid
alternatives and asks, “Are you married or not?”
The instant reply is: “Neither, and both at once.”
This time, because the question concerns fact,
not advice, the alternatives do cover all possibil-
ities: at any moment, one must either be married
or not married; and similarly, one cannot be both
married and not married. Here, Trouillogan’s re-
sponse really is self-contradictory and pure pyr-
rhonism. Thus, though highly comic, this
exchange does not mean that Trouillogan is be-
ing merely evasive; as befits a “perfect philoso-
Turks 253
pher,” he is consistently giving the best answers
available to him, within his pyrrhonist philoso-
phy. Similarly, when Panurge rephrases his ques-
tion without an alternative (“Are you married?”),
Trouillogan replies, “I think so.” For a pyrrhon-
ist, this is a sensible answer.
Not surprisingly, Panurge gives up in despair.
More strikingly, however, Gargantua shares his
frustration at Trouillogan’s noncommittal an-
swers: “Henceforth we may catch . . . birds by
their feet, but never will such philosophers be
caught in their words.” It has been suggested that
here the text mocks the old king, disconcerted by
innovations that he simply cannot understand.
Nevertheless, in his way, he indicates that Trouil-
logan’s deliberately oblique language is partly re-
sponsible for Panurge’s failure to gain enlight-
enment from their dialogue.
Readings: Emmanuel Naya, “Ne scepticque ne dog-
matique, et tous les deux ensemble”: Rabelais “On
Phrontistere et escholle des pyrrhoniens,” ER 35
(1998): 81–129; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1979); Véronique Zaercher, Le dia-
logue rabelaisien (Geneva: Droz, 2000).
Ian R. Morrison
TURKS The rise of the Ottoman Turks had
astonished and terrified Christendom since the
dynasty’s appearance around 1300. After rapid
expansion through the Balkans, their forces un-
der Sultan Suleyman II destroyed the Hungarian
kingdom at Mohacs in 1526 and besieged Vi-
enna—unsuccessfully—in 1529. At about this
time Francis I, ignoring the French crusading
tradition, negotiated an entente with the sultan as
a counterweight to the designs of Emperor
Charles V. There are numerous echoes in Ra-
belais of these events and of the depiction of the
Turk in travelers’ writings. Rabelais’s letters
from Rome (1535–36) contain news of the Ot-
toman campaign in Persia as well as skeptical
references to crusade indulgences and to a proph-
ecy of the Turks’ imminent overthrow that was
being widely published by Charles V’s support-
ers. The mockery of Picrochole’s ambition in G
33 includes probable allusions to Charles V’s
thwarted ambitions in North Africa, where he be-
sieged Tunis in 1535 and Algiers in 1541, to his
support for the Knights of St. John, recently ex-
pelled from Rhodes and reestablished by Charles
254 Turks
on Malta, and to the unthinking bloodlust and
territorial ambition of the new crusaders: “ ‘Shall
we not kill all these dogs of Turks and Mahom-
etans?’ said Picrochole. ‘What the devil else shall
we do?’ said they. ‘And you shall give their
goods and land to those who have served you
faithfully.’ ” This chimes with Pantagruel’s
prayer before battle (P 29), where the giant im-
plicitly rejects “holy war” and refuses to inter-
vene in God’s “own business, which is the faith.”
In the prologue to the Fourth Book, Jupiter’s
survey of the political horizon includes two
hopeful signs for France, in that the Sultan has
finished his business with his ancestral foe (cf.
3BK 41) the shah of Persia (freeing him, implic-
itly, to turn against Charles V) and in that Trip-
oli, an outpost of the Knights of St. John, has
fallen “through carelessness; its hour had
come”—rebutting rumors that French treachery
was responsible.
Besides these allusions to the Ottomans’ geo-
political role, one picturesque scene in Panta-
gruel (14) is set in Turkey. Panurge, who in
chapter 9 revealed that he had been taken pris-
oner in Louis XII’s expedition to Mytilene (Les-
bos) in 1502, recounts his escape. The episode
mingles fantasies of alterity (the Turks appear to
be cannibals and polytheists) with a smattering
of solid information, perhaps gleaned from Jehan
Thenaud’s Voyage d’oultre mer (1530). Panurge
uses the neologisms baschatz (pachas) and mus-
safiz (glossed in the Briefve Déclaration as “doc-
tors and prophets”), deplores the Muslim prohi-
bition on wine, and essays some cod-Arabic. In
this pseudoromantic scene, the formidable Turks
are comfortingly portrayed as buffoons and cow-
ards.
Readings: Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in
French History, Thought and Literature (1520–1660)
(Paris: Boivin, n.d.); Frédéric Tinguely, L’ecriture du
Levant à la Renaissance: Enquête sur les voyageurs
français dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Ge-
neva: Droz, 2000).
Michael J. Heath
 U
URQUHART, SIR THOMAS (1611–58) The
first translator of Rabelais into English, Urquhart
was born in 1611 in Cromarty, in the far north
of Scotland. After taking a degree at Aberdeen
University and traveling on the Continent, he re-
turned to Scotland in 1635. From then onward
his life was never untroubled, and his eccentric
works, or “elucubrations” as he termed them, al-
ways aimed either at freeing his ancestral lands
from his father’s creditors’ claims, or securing
his own release from the Tower, where Oliver
Cromwell had imprisoned him as a Royalist. The
frequently bawdy epigrams Apollo and the
Muses (1640)—the manuscript is in the Beineke
Library at Yale—were followed by Epigrams
Divine and Moral in 1641. In 1645 his Trissso-
tetras postulated a mnemonic approach to trigo-
nometry, but his enormous Latin- and Greek-
based coinages render the book virtually
impenetrable. From 1651, in prison, Urquhart
can hardly have stopped writing. After Panto-
chronocanon (1652), a largely fantastical tracing
of the Urquhart family back to Adam, there came
in quick succession Ekskubalauron (1652), an
idiosyncratic history of Scotland, then Logopan-
decteision (1653), the guidelines of a uni-
versal language accompanied by much self-
aggrandizing bluster, and lastly, also in 1653, his
magisterial translation of the first two books of
Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where all
of his linguistic extravagances and high-
spiritedness happily combined as literature. Ap-
parently, Urquhart’s self-petitioning reached
Cromwell’s ears, for in 1653 he was released. He
died in Middelburg, in Holland, in 1658. An un-
confirmed account that he died of a fit of laughter
on hearing of the Restoration is almost certainly
a fiction.
Readings: Roger Craik, Sir Thomas Urquhart of
Cromarty (1611–1660): Adventurer, Polymath, and
Translator of Rabelais (Lewiston, NJ: Mellen Re-
search University Press, 1993); “Sir Thomas Urqu-
hart’s Apollo and the Muses,” Yale University Gazette
70 (1996): 135–43; R.D.S. Jack and R. J. Lyle, eds.
The Jewel by Sir Thomas Urquhart (Edinburgh: Scot-
tish Academic Press, 1983); John Willcock, Sir Tho-
mas Urquhart of Cromartie (Edinburgh: Oliphant, An-
derson & Ferrier, 1899).
Roger Craik
UTOPIA The shortened title of a work of fic-
tion by Sir Thomas More (1516) which, like
Montaigne’s Essais, gave rise to a new literary
genre of the same name. Based on two Greek
roots, oy¬ (no, not) and to¬pos (place, region),
More’s Utopia is a newly discovered island that is
nonetheless located “no place” or “nowhere.” By
the time he coined the term, Europeans were fa-
miliar with dozens of “proto-utopian” elements
ranging from Greco-Roman nostalgia for a lost
Golden Age to the messianic, eschatological, and
millennarian yearnings of the Jewish and Chris-
tian traditions. But More’s Utopia does not de-
pend on divine intervention or require the univer-
sal regeneration of humanity. Social evils have
been reduced or eliminated there because the best
form of government had been established from
the ground up by rational human enterprise.
Numerous passing references to Utopie, les
Amaurotes, and Dipsodie in his own books prove
that Rabelais was familiar with More’s work. But
in a larger sense, both Pantagruel and Gargan-
tua share deep affinities with the spirit of Utopia.
Rabelais’s goal of reforming secular and relig-
ious education, which is largely implicit in Pan-
tagruel but which constitutes the principal theme
of Gargantua (13–15, 21–24), is presented as a
way of greatly improving the lives of all mem-
bers of society. The lessons to be drawn from the
Picrocholine War (G. 25–50) are also utopian in
256 Utopia
the sense that they oppose the Erasmian educa-
tion of the ideal prince to the chaotic medieval
traditions of militaristic aggression, continual ter-
ritorial expansionism at the expense of the weak,
unbridled violence, and so on. The celebrated
Abbey of Thélème (G 52–57) can be seen as a
scaled-down version of More’s Utopia, and Ra-
belais’s oft-expressed desire for religious reform
demonstrates nostalgia for a return to the utopian
conditions of the primitive Church.
More’s last two books call into question the
possibility of bringing about successful large-
scale transformations and paint a darker picture
of human nature, which seems better suited to
creating dystopias. Panurge’s obstinate, seem-
ingly inexorable descent into moral and spiritual
autism renders him incapable of using his reason
or grasping the liberating potential of evangelical
charity and pantagruélisme. He also becomes
vulnerable to the most absurd suggestions about
obtaining answers to his questions. The archi-
pelago of the Fourth Book offers many varieties
of collective obsessions fueled by fear and hatred
of those who are different. Finally, although the
message of the oracle is often considered to be
an exhortation to accept the limits of the human
condition, it hardly lives up to the initial expec-
tations of the gentilz compagnons.
Readings: Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Realistic Utopias.
The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance,
1516–1630 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Carla
Freccero, “Thélème: Temporality, Utopia, Supple-
ment,” Father Figures. Genealogy and Narrative
Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991); Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and
the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1998).
William H. Huseman
 V
VILLON, FRANÇOIS (1431–after 1463)
Villon is a French fifteenth-century poet and
scholar remembered as much for his brazen per-
sonality as for his fine and witty verse. Described
by Clément Marot in 1533 as “the best Parisian
poet around” (“le meilleur poète parisien qui se
trouve”), Villon is best known for the works Tes-
tament, Ballade des dames du temps jadis, and
Ballade des pendus. Only 3,000 lines of Villon’s
poetry are known today. Imprisoned at least
twice for murder, theft, and assault, Villon van-
ished when he was thirty-two and no subsequent
record of him exists. This mysterious disappear-
ance augments his legend. Much read in the six-
teenth century, Villon’s works were ignored with
the advent of classicism but enjoyed renewed
popularity in the nineteenth century.
Rabelais’s fleeting references to Villon in
chapters 14 and 23 of Pantagruel (1532) reflect
both Villon’s poetry and his reputation. In the
poetry, the giant Pantagruel’s ne’er-do-well
friend Panurge compares his loss of money to
Villon’s famous query, “But where are the snows
of yesteryear?” (“Mais où sont les neiges
d’antan?”). With this remark Rabelais highlights
what remains to this day Villon’s most famous
line. Chapter 23 describes Villon haggling with
the former Persian king Xerxes over the price of
mustard. Villon protests Xerxes’s hard bargain
by urinating into the mustard bucket. Mentioning
Villon in neither Gargantua (1534) nor the
Third Book (1543), Rabelais twice highlights the
Villon persona in his final edition of the Fourth
Book (1552). The stories found in both chapters
13 and 67 portray Villon as a ribald bon vivant
who offers witty rhymes—rewritings of Villon’s
actual verse—as he first performs a cruel hoax
and, second, nonchalantly pays a visit to the Eng-
lish king Edward V. Rabelais has transformed
Villon into an older gadfly who mingles com-
fortably with peasantry and royalty alike. Rabe-
lais’s sketches of Villon’s problematic character
serve to underscore Panurge’s flawed nature.
Readings: Margaret Harp, “Panurge and the Villon
Legend in Rabelais’s Quart Livre,” Aevum 3 (1996):
619–23; Louis Thuasne, Villon et Rabelais (Paris,
1911).
Margaret Harp
VIOLENCE Written during a century full of
bloody wars and civil strife, Rabelais’s work sur-
prisingly contains relatively few violent scenes.
Its depictions of graphic and lethal violence are
usually symbolic or even allegorical in nature. Of
the many battles and attacks described in the
work, the most significant is undoubtedly the Pi-
crocholine War (G 25–42), which parodies the
figure of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Hav-
ing been educated by his humanist tutors shortly
before this conflict, Gargantua demonstrates his
prowess as a warrior as well as the fruits of his
learning, both of which were requirements for
Renaissance gentlemen. Moreover, Frère Jean
kills a preposterous number of enemy soldiers in
order to save his grape vines, in a hyperbolic
parody of the Homeric battle scenes of the Iliad
(G 27). The violence depicted in this war thus
serves multiple purposes: it satirizes the Franco-
Spanish conflict of the first half of the sixteenth
century, it mocks the stereotypical gluttony and
alcoholism of monks, and it emblematizes the
figure of the Renaissance prince. Aside from
these typically polyvalent functions, Rabelaisian
violence is highly stylized and develops accord-
ing to fixed comic codes (e.g., the usage of the
spit on which Panurge was being roasted by the
Turks to kill one of his captors [P 14]), or fol-
lows the dictates of the parodic, anatomical de-
scriptions that are among the distinguishing char-
acteristics of the author’s style, as in the near
258 Virgil
blasphemous scene of Gargantua’s birth (G 6),
or in the aforementioned passage in which Frère
Jean goes on his rampage.
The episode of the Haughty Lady of Paris (P
21–22) raises the important question as to what
may be considered “violent” in Rabelais’s work,
given the radically different perspective from
which we read it. Panurge’s treatment of the Par-
isian lady has (rightly) been read as an instance
of male misogynistic violence and figurative
rape, although sixteenth-century readers would
likely have seen only the comic topoi of the
story—that is, the parody of a religious proces-
sion, the carnivalesque smearing of the body in
refuse, the intrusion of animals into the human
domain, the false genealogy of the stinking
stream behind the Gobelins textile factory—
without recognizing the story as violent.
Similarly, learned readers would have enjoyed
the Homeric references in Gargantua without be-
ing shocked by their violence. Hence, the issue
of realism is crucial to an understanding of vi-
olence in Rabelais. After nearly two hundred
years of realism and its attendant valorizations,
it is difficult for modern readers to see the de-
piction of violence as a kind of trope or figure
of style. One accepts the notion that works of
fiction represent real or (at least) possible worlds,
and the idea that a great writer could laugh at
and even relish violent scenes—see, for example,
Panurge’s delight at torturing bourgeois ladies
and theology students in Pantagruel 16—is un-
acceptable to a modern reader. Perhaps a more
appropriate reaction to Rabelais would be to un-
derstand the depiction of violence as one type of
conventional description among many others de-
rived from the multiplicity of narrative traditions
and techniques that the writer adopts and paro-
dies.
Readings: Douglas L. Boudreau-Tiefezh, “Death in
the Quart Livre,” RN 37.2 (1997): 183–91; Guy De-
merson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Revue littéraire
mensuelle (Europe) 70.757 (1992): 67–79; Dominique
Garand, “Rabelais au risque de la topique,” Violence
et fiction jusqu’à la Révolution, ed. Gabrielle Verdier
(Paris: Etudes Littéraires Françaises, 1995).
David LaGuardia
VIRGIL To the extent that the trope of the
journey in Rabelais is a literalized or spatialized
journey of the individual (a figure, in turn, of
appetite or desire), the Chroniques constute a dis-
tinctively Homeric enterprise (see Homer). But
the journey can just as much be viewed as the
key to the Chroniques as a work inspired by or
modeled upon the Virgilian epic. This is true in
at least two senses. First, Rabelais’s narrative can
be approached as everywhere informed by the
structure of the temporal journey; the Chroniques
are an exercise in time-traveling in which linear
adventures are everywhere fractured and compli-
cated by prophetic and historical or genealogical
perspectives. Second, the narrative of past or
present in Rabelais almost always carries with it
a collective or communitarian force: recollection
or prognostication becomes a matter of cultural
foundation and utopian construction. These are
the narratives on which Virgilian epic depends.
Let us begin with the second point first. In an
obvious or literal sense, the Rabelaisian wars of
domination and colonization (the wars against
the Dipsodes and the Pichrocholians) are an Il-
iadic and, by extension, an Aeneidic theme. It is
also true that Gargantua and Pantagruel are Par-
isian narratives and that Rabelais’s Paris can be
viewed as Virgil’s Rome. The famous or infa-
mous image, envisioned by Panurge, of a city
whose walls are constructed entirely of vulvas
and that must therefore be indestructible, sug-
gests the extent to which the Chroniques promote
an ideology of city-building, of empire. Thus,
Panurge is not just Odysseus, but also Achates
to Pantagruel’s Aeneas. Odysseus is the lone
survivor of his odyssey: the Homeric journey is
the journey of the individual, returning to rein-
tegrate into the community. But Pantagruel re-
mains one with his friends (a symbol of cohe-
sion, community, and fidelity from beginning to
end). See the list of faithful hero-friend pairs in
the very last chapter (47) of the Fifth Book, and
their journey is one that aims to build a com-
munity that cannot yet be said to exist. Aeneas’s
story cannot be separated from Rome’s; it is one
and the same. The Chroniques, then, are every-
where concerned with foundation, with the con-
struction of ideal communities or utopias. Thé-
lème, of course, represents the most obvious and
explicit of these communities. (Pantagruel’s own
nation is the Amaurotes, or “Obscure”; it is sit-
uated in Utopia.)

Thélème, as a utopian empire, is also a future
present: an ideal teleology. As such, it suggests
to what extent the Chroniques depend on a kind
of temporal elasticity that is specifically Virgilian
in nature (inflected, as always, with biblical
force). Thus, Rabelais’s frequent genealogies,
vistas opened upon a mythic past, always point
inevitably and simultaneously toward a distant—
and collective—future. Like the Aeneid, the
Chroniques represent a genealogical, and
therefore messianic, epic. Gargantua’s letter to
Pantagruel (P 8), before addressing the specifics
of a humanist education, begins with Gargan-
tua’s hopes of living in and through his son, and
the attendant Virgilian image of the “generations
of men.” The fantastic genealogy of Pantagruel
is modeled as much upon Anchises’s narrative of
Rome as it is upon Matthew’s geneaology of
Christ. (It also reverses Ovid’s etiology of hu-
mankind at Metamorphoses 1.156–162, where
men spring from the earth soaked with the blood
of slain Titans.)
It is important to stress the extent to which
geneaology in Rabelais functions as an image of
historical and communitarian coherence and sta-
bility. The most powerful instance of this prac-
tice is to be found at Gargantua 1, where Ra-
belais capitalizes on the early modern topos of
the translatio imperii and studii. This is a Vir-
gilian genealogy of cultural power that links cul-
tural origins seamlessly with a utopian future.
The model here is once again Anchises’s post-
humous narration of Roman past, present, and
future in Aeneid 6—the single most significant
passage for Rabelais’s purposes in the Chro-
niques.
Rabelais’s text is everywhere driven by this
prophetic impulse. Panurge’s consultation with
the sibyls in the Third Book (16–18) suggests, as
it does in Virgil, the force of a transcendent and
eschatological impulse. At the end of the Fifth
Book we find ourselves in the Temple of Bac-
chus, with Bacbuc, a sybelline priestess, and a
Virgilian figure par excellence. The sound of the
Dive Bouteille is compared to the drone of bees
in a bull—a clear allusion to the oft-cited and
influential bugonia of Virgil’s Georgic 4, which
was commonly moralized in the medieval and
early modern periods as a prophetic image of the
Voyage 259
Eucharist: bees symbolizing humanity regener-
ated by the blood of Christ.
But just as in Virgil, Rabelais always seeks to
critique the eschatological impulse, to cast doubt
upon prophetic certainties and utopian destina-
tions. Virgil’s Georgic 4 ends with the suffering
of the decapitated Orpheus. It has often been
pointed out to what extent the tale of Rome tri-
umphant in the Aeneid itself is undermined by
intimations of moral bankruptcy and the possi-
bility of apocalypse. Anchises’s narrative at
Aeneid 6 ends on a note of fratricide and chaos
that is all too easily recognizable in the landscape
of Virgil’s contemporary readers. Rabelais, as the
wars of religion erupt around him, plays a similar
game in the Chroniques. Like Virgil, Rabelais
refuses to take solace in any stable ideology or
historical structure or textual referent: as for Vir-
gil, for Rabelais the past is no guarantee of the
future.
One might conclude here with Panurge’s con-
sultation of the Virgilian and Homeric lots (3BK
10–15), in the Third Book: the consultation of
the Greek and especially the Roman epic as a
prophetic guide by opening up its pages at ran-
dom. But randomness is precisely the problem in
Rabelais, as it is in Virgil. It is interesting to see
how Rabelais both embraces and distances him-
self from the prophetic and the Virgilian. For in
chapters 10 and 11 of the Third Book, Pantagruel
recommends the use of both Virgil and dice—
dice being the perfect emblem here of the alea-
tory. The image is one that suggests the emblem-
atic Rabelaisian synthesis (or lack of synthesis)
between historical precedents or textual grounds
and the uncertain and uninterpretable force of the
random.
Readings: Gérard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux
et la sagesse du monde dans la première moitié du
XVIe siècle,” French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexing-
ton, KY: French Forum, 1982); Myth and Legend in
French Literature, ed. Keith Aspley, David Bellos,
and Peter Sharratt (London: Modern Humanities Re-
search Association, 1982) 47–50.
Matthew Gumpert
VOYAGE Rabelais traveled extensively dur-
ing his lifetime. Born near Chinon, he studied at
Fontenay-Le-Comte in the Bas-Poitou and at
Maillezais. He then traveled to Bordeaux, Tou-
260 Voyage
louse, Orléans, Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and
throughout the south of France. He later prac-
ticed medicine in several French cities, as well
as traveling to and practicing in Turin and Rome,
Italy. Later in life, Rabelais lived in Metz, then
in Saint-Maur, France.
This actual, physical life experience of travel
is rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, by the
sort of intellectual travel that Rabelais experi-
enced in his humanist quest for knowledge, and
in the abstract, imagined displacements—shifts
in the space of knowledge, whether ideological
or spiritual, shared or solely subjective—that he
requires of himself and his readers.
His four—perhaps five (the anonymous Fifth
Book not having been surely attributed)—pieces
of literature all come under the rubric of epic
literature, but it is undeniable that, in both con-
ventional and unconventional ways (how they
enlarge the scope of hermeneutical apprehension
and the philosophical language of alterity), Pan-
tagruel, Gargantua, the Third Book and the
Fourth Book are also masterpieces of a new var-
iant of travel literature. They both describe the
real space in which their fictive exploits tran-
spire—Chinon and environs, in Gargantua; Poi-
tou, Paris and—a hint of theoretical space—Uto-
pia in Pantagruel; a sea voyage and escales or
ports of call at several islands in the Fourth Book
(continued in the Fifth Book)—as well as invite
the reader into a meditation on the nature of life
and gnosis: a kind of guided tour of systems of
knowledge. These compositions—episodic, ap-
parently fragmented—mime the stop-and-start
nature of a person on a trip, pausing here and
there to glean information or simply just to look
around.
The Third Book is the least explicitly land-
linked of all; it recounts Panurge’s incessant
personal divagations, emotional and intellectual,
and his quest for knowledge and reassurance as
he assays various methods for finding and keep-
ing a wife. In that sense, the Third Book is per-
haps the most obvious component of the new sort
of travel literature that Rabelais is drafting, for it
requires the reader to enter into the ontological
and subjective space of another being. Panurge
himself is a form of trickster, a shape-shifter
whom Gérard Defaux has described as an am-
biguous, pliable character subject to internal
metamorphoses. Panurge, that is to say, travels
both within and without himself. Rabelais’s fas-
cination with both experiential and virtual space
and travel, a reflection not only of his own search
for knowledge but also of his time period’s fas-
cination with travel, cartography, and cosmog-
raphy, manifests itself from the very inception of
his narrative project: “It won’t be a waste of
time, since we’re in no particular hurry, if I begin
by reminding you of the primal roots from which
our good Pantagruel flowered. Besides, all good
historians begin their chronicles that way, and
not just the Arabs, the Barbarians, and the Ro-
mans, but also the noble Greeks” (P 1; GP 135).
By commencing Pantagruel with reference to
other nations of the world (“Arabs,” “Barbari-
ans,” “Romans,” “Greeks”) and thereby intro-
ducing the “other” into his text, Rabelais begins
to map out the space of the text, and the space
toward which it will travel, in its quest for
knowledge. This search is always relativistic
rather than self-referential.
Rabelais, avatar of humanist curiosity and en-
cyclopedic cravings par excellence, invites his
reader to join him on a textual journey toward
the discovery of multilayered resonance rather
than exclusive, totalitarian interpretation. He
seeks a reader who will not perform a reduction,
but rather an amplification of meaning, and
hopes for a journeyman geographer not content
with the confines of the known world, but rather
avid for the far-flung, unexplored reaches be-
yond: one who will become, like Rabelais him-
self, “ung abysme de science” (“an abyss of
knowledge” [P 8]).
Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoy-
age of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading
of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1982); Tom Conley, “Du mot à la
carte: Verbal Cartographies of Gargantua (ch. 33),”
Writing the Renaissance; Essays on Sixteenth-Century
French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray, ed. Ray-
mond La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum,
1992); Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au
prophète: Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, et Le
quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Michel Jeanneret,
Perpetuum mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des
oeuvres de Vinci à Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997).
Catharine Randall
 W
WARFARE For Rabelais war was always
metaphorical, as illustrated by Pantagruel’s
shattering the very possibility of resistance in the
physetere episode of the Fourth Book (33–34).
This conquest of nature follows the evocation of
the best (Guillaume du Bellay [27]) and worst
of men (the “Papelars” and “Demoniacal Cal-
vins, Genevan Impostors” [32]), and encouraged
readers to revel in the giant’s destructive prow-
ess. The Physetere episode leads immediately to
the comic battle with sausages and then to the
more obviously mimetic encounter with the re-
doubtable Homenaz. Along with the concluding
chapters and the storm reworked from the 1548
edition, it can be read as a reassertion and cele-
bration of Pantagruel’s humanity, in contrast to
the proto-Baroque challenges of the rest of the
Fourth Book.
The earliest book, Pantagruel, also centered
on the epochal struggle between the human and
the bestial. After Panurge shows that “ingenuity
is worth more than force” (P 27) by roasting their
chivalric adversaries over a slow fire, Pantagruel
embodies Christian conduct in his duel with the
werewolf Loup Garou. For all the piety of his
prayer (where Cuius regio, eius religio makes an
early appearance), the giant forgets the primacy
of faith for a moment in the heat of the battle.
His Creator intervenes as promised, however,
and delivers a champion who would have been
sundered from nave to chaps without His aid.
Nowhere are the differences between Panta-
gruel and Gargantua more clear than in their
martial metaphors. The contrast between
Grandgousier’s eagerness to appease his chol-
eric neighbors and Frère Jean’s ardor makes
space for the political concerns central to this
book. The old Europe of weak monarchs united
under the tutelage of an emperor aspiring to
world dominion was represented by Picrochole,
while the new political order of strong and in-
dependent kings was represented by the younger
generation, Gargantua and his companions. The
most explicit elaboration of this vision was Ul-
rich Gallet’s Ciceronian harangue, in which Gal-
let recalls how two autonomous monarchs were
able to band together to preserve peace and pros-
perity for both of them. Such an arrangement re-
called the brief but close alliance between Fran-
cis I and Henry viii and the negotiations in Rome
on Henry’s behalf by Jean du Bellay, Rabelais’s
patron and bishop of Paris.
The metaphorical nature of Rabelais’s ongoing
interest in warfare is made most explicit in the
prologue to the Third Book, when the narrator
takes preparation for war as emblematic of civic
life in general. In the first chapter, however, he
makes clear that his interest will be less in the
violent changes wrought by force of arms than
in the influence of family life. In Gargantua, Ra-
belais had sketched his vision of a political order
freed from traditional constraints; twelve years
later, he had become unabashedly conservative.
Panurge’s Praise of Debts immediately reveals
his now characteristic solipsism, for which the
remedy shown throughout the rest of the book,
for instance in the selection of marriage part-
ners, is reinforced reliance on patriarchal author-
ity.
Reading: Edward Benson, “The Development of
Rabelais’ Historical Consciousness in the Picrocholine
and Dipsodean Wars,” ER 13 (1976): 159–61.
Edward Benson
WECHEL, CHRÉTIEN (ff. 1526–54) Pari-
sian printer/bookseller and a humanist publisher,
for example, of the earliest French editions of the
Emblemata of Andrea Alciato. Printed the first
edition of the Third Book in 1546 but was not
employed by Rabelais again, with whom he may
262 Wine
well have been involved in a legal dispute early
in 1546.
Reading: Hubert Elie, “Chretien Wechel, imprimeur
à Paris,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1954): 181–97.
Stephen Rawles
WINE A dominant theme in Rabelais’s work,
wine provides a key to his meaning and his sym-
bolic system in general. The opening words,
“Beuveurs très illustres” (“Illustrious topers,” G
prol.) address readers capable of drinking in Ra-
belais’s message. The greatest topers are Pan-
tagruel (⫽ All-Athirst) and Gargantua (“Que
grand tu as! supple le gousier” [“What a big one
you have! meaning the throat”] G 7). Rabelais’s
wine, the content of his apparently frivolous
books, must be interpreted as “a plus hault sens,”
in the higher sense, and he promises revelations
of high sacraments and mysteries. He compares
himself to Homer and Ennius, admitting that his
book smells more of wine than of study-lamp oil
(G prol.).
The prologue to the Third Book is again ad-
dressed to the Good Topers, inviting them to phi-
losophize “en vin, non en vain, ains plus-que-
physicalement” (“in wine, not in vain, thus more
than physically”). Like Diogenes, Rabelais rolls
his barrel and invites the good topers to drink,
for his barrel/book has an inexhaustible and eter-
nal source. It will never run dry; Good Hope lies
at the bottom.
Wine appears in repeated banquet scenes
throughout the five books, prominently in Gar-
gantua, the “propos des bien yvres,” where the
punning is based on ecclesiastical and evangeli-
cal joking. Wine dominates chapter 27, where
Frère Jean defends the abbey vineyard, deci-
mating the enemy with the base of the crucifix
as a club. This terrible weapon (⫽ the foundation
of the faith) defeats the marauding army and
transforms the fallen into a bloody mess resem-
bling trampled grapes.
In the Fourth Book, the figureheads on the
twelve ships are mostly emblems of wine: a half-
full bottle, a tankard, a wine-pot, a vase, a
monk’s drinking-bowl, a funnel, a goblet, a glass,
and a wine-cask. The Divine Bottle chapters of
the Fifth Book, penned by Rabelais or by some-
one with equivalent erudition, manipulate the
same symbols. Led by the priestess Bacbuc (im-
itating the sound of wine being decanted), the
company enters the temple through a vineyard
planted by Bacchus, god of wine and a symbol
for Christ. The temple floor is paved with repro-
ductions of grape vines so realistic that the com-
pany feels it is walking above a real vineyard.
The walls depict the conquest of India by Bac-
chus (figuring the conquest of the infidel by
Christ). Once Panurge has performed the ritual,
the Word he hears from the bottle is simply (and
profoundly) “Trinch!” (⫽ Trink! ⫽ Drink!).
What is the symbolism of the wine? Rabelais
works on two levels simultaneously: surface rib-
aldry and joking, and profound seriousness. On
the deeper level, he draws on traditional Chris-
tian and hermetic sources rediscovered by pre-
cursors: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Mar-
silio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, and Francesco
Colonna. Rabelais’s preoccupation with wine
symbolism is not unusual for his time: from the
fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, in-
creasingly bloody crucifixion scenes and cruci-
fixes were created. The mystical theme of “The
Fountain of Life” depicts the cross rising from a
large chalice filled with the blood flowing from
Christ’s wounds, while the faithful prepare for a
purifying, saving baptism of blood. Eucharistic
symbolism produces, for example, depictions of
Christ crushed by a giant cruciform winepress,
his blood gushing into a waiting vat. His is eter-
nal, inexhaustible blood, like the wine in Rabe-
lais’s barrel, having already filled countless wine
barrels being hauled away and stored in
churches. Rabelais’s barrel-books contain Wis-
dom, the Good News as purveyed in his jolly
Franciscan, Benedictine, evangelical idiom. His
church, the wine of his message, consists of com-
munion, prayer, thanksgiving, joy, and full par-
ticipation in the banquet of life. Eucharistia, Ec-
clesia, Evangelium unite for him as aspects of
Christ the Logos, all part of the Good News, the
potus laetitiae.
Readings: Edwin Duval, “La messe, la cène, et le
voyage sans fin du Quart livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–
41; Etienne Gilson, “Rabelais franciscain,” Les idées
et les lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1955); Fred W. Marshall,
“Les symboles des allégories de Rabelais,” BAARD
5. 2 (1993): 86–102; Per Nykrog, “Thélème, Panurge
et la Dive Bouteille,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de
la France 65 (1965): 383–97; M. A. Screech,

L’Evangélisme de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1959);
Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1972); Florence Wein-
berg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire (Orléans: Para-
digme, 2000).
Florence M. Weinberg
WOMEN The question of the portrayal of
women in Rabelais’s books has the status of a
veritable querelle or polemic, with critics arguing
either that Rabelais champions the equality of
women—citing the enlightened sexual politics of
the Abbey of Thélème to prove it—or that he is
a misogynist in the grand tradition—pointing to
the episode of the Haughty Lady of Paris and
the debates on marriage in the Third Book as
evidence for the claim. Rabelais’s women are
few and far between: Gargantua and Panta-
gruel’s mothers (G 3–4; P 2), who die early on
in the lives of the two heroes; the girls who assist
the boys in creating the leagues of France (P 23;
TLF 15); the women referred to in Thélème,
whose presence counters conventional represen-
tations of convents and monasteries as gender-
segregated environments (G 50–55; TLF 52–57);
Bacbuc, the Sybil-like oracle of the Holy Bottle
(Fifth Book); and, of course, the Haughty Lady
of Paris whom Panurge courts, and her nameless
counterpart, the lady who sends a ring and a
cryptic message to Pantagruel upon his desertion
of her (P 23–24; TLF 14–15).
Indeed, these last two constitute the only real
potential disruption of the all-male world of Ra-
belais’s epic-cum-quest narrative, wherein a
hero—after numerous trials and adventures in
the company of men—embarks upon a journey,
not for himself but for his sidekick, to answer
the question of whether Panurge should marry.
Since the narrative targets precisely that conven-
tion of male questing that consists in cherchez la
femme, it is no surprise that she should remain,
for the most part, an elusive object. Yet, in these
twin chapters—which have, as their source, an
Italian short story by Masuccio Salernitano (Il
Novellino, story 41)—the question of woman’s
subjectivity is both raised and articulated. On the
one hand, the episode of the Haughty Lady of
Paris represents the female voice in direct dia-
logue with Panurge and leaves room in that di-
alogue for difference, especially the difference of
Women 263
interpretation that arises as a result, in part, of
the gender of each speaker. On the other hand,
the episode of the ring (P 23–24; TLF 14–15)
both thematizes “woman” as resistive inscription
in the text and critiques efforts to force it to yield
up its meaning to masculine acts of reading. Fi-
nally, the episode suggests that “woman” as in-
telligible sign functions as a relay for the mas-
culine unconscious and thus that “woman” per se
is, as Luce Irigaray (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un)
has argued, nowhere to be found in the economy
of masculine signification.
The lady, whom Pantagruel abandoned when
he left Paris upon hearing of his father’s death,
sends him a message, an inscribed diamond ring
accompanied by a blank letter. Panurge and com-
pany try all manner of decoding techniques to
force the letter to yield letters, but to no avail.
The message, as ultimately decoded, is to be
found in the materiality of the ring and its in-
scription. The false diamond and the phrase, “la-
mah hazabtani” (described as Hebrew in the
text), must be translated (on the one hand, from
matter to meaning and, on the other, from one
language and linguistic context to another) into
“Dy, amant faulx, pourquoy me as tu laissée?”
(“Say, false lover, why did you leave me?”). It-
self this is an untranslatable phrase insofar as
translation must forego the double meaning of
the “false diamond” (“diamant faulx”) conveyed
by the French decoding. The resistive inscription
that is the woman’s message signifies, but the
materiality of the signifier refuses to yield itself
in full.
Lamah hazabtani is also the phrase Jesus
speaks to his father on the cross, and thus, for
Pantagruel, it is an unconscious echo of his own
situation of having lost his father (who has been,
as the text puts it, “translated” to the country of
fairies [P 23; TLF 15]). Pantagruel, like the lady,
has been abandoned by someone he loves, and
whereas for her it is him, for him it is his father.
She thus occupies his place in relation to the lost
object of love. In the encounter with difference,
what Pantagruel finds is an identification. Al-
though readers might therefore wish to point to
this moment as further evidence of Rabelais’s
erasure of or disregard for women, the text nev-
ertheless seems to have anticipated just that per-
ception; for the identification with and erasure of
264 Women
the woman the episode performs occur around
the question of loss, erasure, or, better yet,
“translation.” Ultimately, whatever one may say
about Rabelais’s portrayal of women, his text al-
legorizes the impossibility of either fully effacing
or fully representing (sexual) difference, the dif-
ference that is “woman.”
Readings: Carla Freccero, “The ‘Instance’ of the
Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” Rabelais’s
Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed. Raymond
La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986);
Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Min-
uit, 1977), translated as This Sex Which Is Not One,
trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); François Rigo-
lot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Bib-
lical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of
Exemplarity,” PMLA 109.2 (March 1994): 225–37;
Masuccio Salernitano, Il Novellino, ed. A. Mauro
(Bari: Laterza, 1940); Michael A. Screech, The Rab-
elaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion,
Ethics, and Comic Philosophy (London: Arnold,
1958); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura, “Toward a Feminist
Reading of Rabelais,” JMRS 15.1 (Spring 1985): 124–
34.
Carla Freccero
 X
XENOMANES A noble and seasoned explorer
engaged by Panurge at the end of the Third
Book, Xenomanes determines the itinerary of
the Thalamège on its way to visit Bacbuc, the
oracle of the Holy Bottle. His name, meaning
“lover of foreign lands and people,” epitomizes
the outgoing curiosity of Pantagruel and his
companions during their travels recounted in the
Fourth Book. Described as a great “traverseur
de voies périlleuses (passerby of perilous
ways),” Xenomanes is perhaps an oblique refer-
ence to Rabelais’s friend, the poet Jean Bouchet
who gave himself the same title as acknowledg-
ment of his spiritual struggles. As navigator, Xe-
nomanes is the only crew member familiar with
the many alien communities that Pantagruel and
his friends encounter during their voyage. He
thus influences Pantagruel in his choice of stops
on the voyage. In chapters 29–33 of the Fourth
Book, Xenomanes serves as a powerful narrator
in his description of Quaresmeprenant, or
Lentkeeper, whom he discourages Pantagruel
from meeting. This “great snail eater” reigns
over an island community devoted to exagger-
ated and perpetual Lenten practice, devoid of
spiritual intent. Xenomanes assures Pantagruel
that the gaunt ruler’s habit of crying for three-
fourths of the day while maintaining a diet of
dry peas would make him very poor company
for the jubilant Thalamège crew. Xenomanes
nonetheless offers an encyclopedic description
of Quaresmeprenant’s appearance, behavior, and
character, providing both crew and readers a
vivid and diverting account of the island. Pan-
tagruel readily accepts Xenomanes’s warnings in
both incidents, revealing a level of trust in his
advisers unseen by the largely impetuous island
rulers whom Pantagruel encounters during his
travels.
Reading: Françoise Joukovsky, “Les Narrés du
Tiers livre et du Quart livre” in La nouvelle fran-
çaise à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Slatkine,
1981).
Margaret Harp
 Selected
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SPECIALIZED
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Forschung.” Germanisch-romanische Monat-
schrift 17 (1930): 198–211 and 277–90.
Rawles, Stephen, and M. A. Screech. A New Rabelais
Bibliography. Editions of Rabelais before
1626. ER 20 (Geneva: Droz, 1987).
Saulnier, Verdun-Louis. “Dix années d’études rabe-
laisiennes.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Ren-
aissance 11 (1949): 104–28.
Schrader, Ludvig. “Die Rabelais-Forschung der Jahre
1950–1960: Tendenzen und Ergebnisse.” Ro-
manistisches Jahrbuch, 11 (1960): 161–201.
IMPORTANT EDITIONS OF
RABELAIS’S WORKS
Oeuvres. Ed. Charles Marty-Laveaux. 6 vols. Paris:
Lemerre, 1868–1903.
Oeuvres. Ed. Abel Lefranc and Robert Marichal et al.
7 vols. Paris and Geneva: E. Champion and E.
Droz, 1912–65.
Oeuvres. Ed. Variorium. 9 vols. Paris: Dalibon, 1923–
26.
Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Jean Plattard. 5 vols. Paris: F.
Roches, 1929.
Pantagruel. Ed. Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Geneva:
Droz, 1946.
The quart livre. Ed. Robert Marichal. Geneva: Droz,
1947.
L’Abbaye de Thélème. Ed. Raoul Morçay. Geneva:
Droz, 1947.
Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Marcel Guilbaud. 5 vols.
Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1957.
Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien
Scheler (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Paris:
Gallimard, 1959.
Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Pierre Jourda. 2 vols. Paris:
Garnier, 1962.
Le tiers livre. Ed. Michael A. Screech. Geneva: Droz,
1964.
Pantagruel. Ed. Verelun-Louis Saulnier. Geveva:
Droz, 1965.
Gargantua. Ed. Ruth Calder, Michael A. Screech, and
Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1970.
Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Guy Demerson. Paris: Seuil,
1973.
Oeuvres completes. Ed. Mireille Huchon. Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
STANDARD TRANSLATIONS
François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.
Jacques Le Clercq (The Modern Library). New
York: Random House, 1936.
François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.
John Michael Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1955.
François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.
Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux.
Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1955.
François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel: Selec-
tions. Trans. Floyd Gray. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966.
François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.
268 Selected Bibliography
Burton Raffel. New York: W. W. Norton,
1990.
François Rabelais. The Complete Works of Rabelais.
Trans. Donald M. Frame. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991.
IMPORTANT PERIODICALS
Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance (1941 to
present).
Bulletin de l’association des amis de Rabelais et de la
Devinière (1951 to present).
Etudes rabelaisiennes (1959 to present).
Humanisme et Renaissance (1913–32), (1934–40).
Revue des études rabelaisiennes (1903–12).
IMPORTANT CRITICAL
STUDIES
Albala, Ken. Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 2003.
Antonioli, Roland. Rabelais et la médecine. Etudes
Rabelaisiennes 12. Geneva: Droz, 1976.
Auerbach, Erich. “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth.”
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, pp. 262–84. Trans. Willard
Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1953.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es-
says. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hol-
quist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iwol-
sky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
Baraz, Michaël. Rabelais et la joie de la liberté. Paris:
José Corti, 1983.
Beaujour, Michel. Le jeu de Rabelais. Paris: Editions
de l’Herne, 1969.
Berlioz, Marc. Rabelais restitué. Paris, 1978.
Berrong, Richard. Every Man for Himself: Social Or-
der and Its Dissolution in Rabelais. Saratoga,
CA: ANMA Libri, 1985.
———. Rabelais and Bakhtin. Popular Culture in
Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lincoln and Lon-
don: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Berry, Alice Fiola. The Charm of Catastrophe. A
Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
———. Rabelais: “Homo Logos.” Studies in the Ro-
mance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies. A
Literary Anthropology of the French Middle
Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983.
Boulenger, Jacques. Rabelais. Paris: Editions Colbert,
1942.
Bowen, Barbara. The Age of Bluff. Paradox and Am-
biguity in Rabelais and Montaigne. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1972.
———. Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.
———. “L’Episode des Andouilles (Rabelais, Quart
livre, chapitres XXXV–XLIIII), esquisse d’une
méthode de lecture.” Cahiers de Varsovie 8
(1981): 111–26.
———. “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages.”
L’esprit créateur 21 (1981): 12–25.
Brault, Gérard. “ ‘Un abysme de Science.’ On the In-
terpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Panta-
gruel.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renais-
sance 28 (1966): 615–32.
Brown, Huntington. Rabelais in English Literature.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1933.
Busson, Henri. Le rationalisme dans la littérature
française de la Renaissance. Paris: Vrin, 1957,
pp. 157–68.
Campion, Edmund J. Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot
as Readers of Erasmus. New York: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1995.
Carpenter, Nan Cooke. Rabelais and Music. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1954.
Carron, Jean-Claude, ed. François Rabelais: Critical
Assessments. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
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Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of
Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979.
Céard, Jean. La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au
XVIe siècle, en France. Geneva: Droz, 1977.
Céard, Jean, and Jean-Claude Margolin, eds. Rabelais
en son demi-millénaire. Actes du colloque in-
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Geneva: Droz, 1988.
Chesney, Elizabeth A. The Countervoyage of Rabelais
and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two
Renaissance Mock Epics. Durham, NC: Duke
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Clark, Carol. The Vulgar Rabelais. Glasgow: Press-
gang, 1983.
Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. Rabelais: A Critical Study in
Prose Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1973.
Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renais-
sance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1966.
Conley, Tom. The Graphic Unconscious in Early

Modern French Writing. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992.
Cooper, Richard. Rabelais et I’Italie. Geneva: Droz,
1991.
Costa, Dennis. Irenic Apocalypse. Some Uses of Apoc-
alyptic in Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais. Stan-
ford, CA: Anima Libri, 1981.
Defaux, Gérard. Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse
du monde dans la première moitié du XVIe siè-
cle: l’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthè-
nes, Empédocle). Lexington, KY: French Fo-
rum, 1982.
———. “A propos de paroles gelées et dégelées
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tures plurielles’?” Rabelais’s Incomparable
Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond La
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———. Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à
l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siè-
cle. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.
———. Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète:
Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le quart
livre. Geneva: Droz, 1997.
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XVIe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 1961.
Demerson, Guy. François Rabelais. Paris: Fayard,
1991.
———. Rabelais: Une vie, une oeuvre, une époque.
Paris: Balland, 1986.
Demonet, M.-L. “Rabelais métalinguiste.” ER 37
(1999): 115–28.
Desan, Philippe. L’imaginaire économique de la Ren-
aissance. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris
IV—Sorbonne, 2002.
Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane. Rabelais et l’humanisme
civil. ER 27 (Geneva: Droz, 1992).
Dieguez, Manuel de. Rabelais par lui-même. Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1960.
Dontenville, Henri. La mythologie française. Paris:
Payot, 1948.
Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Problèmes de l’utopie. Paris:
Archives des Lettres Modernes, 1968.
Duval, Edwin. The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
———. The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pan-
tagruel. Geneva: Droz, 1998.
———. The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pan-
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———. “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’
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———. “The Medieval Curriculum, the Scholastic
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Selected Bibliography 269
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———. “La messe, la cène, et le voyage sans fin du
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Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change: Communications and Cultural
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Farge, James. “Beda, Noël.” Biographical Register of
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———. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation
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Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Six-
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France, Anatole. Rabelais. Paris: Calmann-Lévy,
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François Rabelais. Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième
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Françon, Marcel, ed. Les croniques admirables du
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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ:
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Glauser, Alfred. Le faux Rabelais, ou L’inauthenticité
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———. “ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the
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———. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk
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Jourda, Pierre. Le Gargantua de Rabelais. Paris:
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Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais,
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———. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature
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———. Recreation, Reflection and Re-creation: Per-
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 Index
Abel. See Cain and Abel
Accursius, Franciscus, 143, 218
Aeneas, 108, 147, 229; friendship with Achates, 86,
258
Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, of Nettesheim, 1, 27, 59,
110, 154, 231
Alberti, 63
Alchemy and alchemists, 1–2, 38, 108; association
of Alcofrybas with, 169, 141; in Fifth Book, 2, 38,
78; Thaumaste and, 66, 175
Alciato, Andrea, 64, 65, 186, 261
Alcofrybas, 2–3, 5, 32, 97, 128, 252, 169, 241; as
character in narrative, 84, 91, 163, 166; disappear-
ance of, 221, 223; first recipient of Salmigondin,
48, 221; as healer, 120, 116; narrative style and
stance of, 15, 39, 41, 70, 91–93, 115, 130–31,
141, 166–67, 194–95, 204, 223
Alexander VI (pope), 30, 108
Allegory, 3–5, 17, 37, 131, 158, 217, 230, 235–36,
244; critical attitude toward, 18, 75, 118–19, 155;
of Enigmatic Prophecy, 68, 93; possible use by
Rabelais, 16, 69, 90, 95– 96, 129, 162, 173, 180,
184, 187, 199, 222, 237, 257, 264; in religious
and platonic contexts, 76, 91, 169
Almanachs, 5–6, 13, 167, 194, 197
Alterity or Otherness, 6, 46, 93, 187, 254, 260
Amaurotes, 7, 163, 176, 255, 258
Amazon, 170
Ambiguity and ambivalence, 17, 36, 44, 51, 70, 72,
80, 81, 96, 110, 127, 129, 130, 131, 140, 152,
172, 196, 199, 202, 209, 223, 233, 246; and
Bakhtin, 18; and folly, 81; of Gargantua, when
Badebec dies, 154; of Gaster, 158, 184; mode of
writing, 44, 52, 96, 130, 170, 252; in other Ren-
aissance texts, 172, 229; of Pantagruelion, 177; of
Panurge and his problem, 110, 157, 202, 223; of
Quaresmeprenant, 199; of reactions to Rabelais,
67; of relationship between text or author and
readers, 131; of Sileni, 196
Anarche, King of the Dipsodes, 7, 34, 54, 102, 114,
146, 176, 246
Andouilles, 7–8, 10, 28, 40, 55, 73, 152, 157, 162,
170, 187, 216, 223; as Swiss reformers, 181
Androgyne, 8–9, 65, 104–5, 114, 131, 169
Aneau, Barthélemy, 205
Animals, 9–11, 33, 52–53, 55, 146, 155, 186, 222,
239; talking, 82
Annian, or Annius, of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni), 20,
101
Anticaritas, 33, 50, 90, 118
Antiphysie, 162, 167, 187, 205
Apedeftes (Island of the Ignorant), 77, 214
Apelles, 12
Apianus, Petrus, 98
Apocalypse, and apocalyptic references, 68, 90, 197,
259
Aquinas, Thomas, 226
Arande, Michel d’, 22
Ariosto, 32, 67, 172
Aristides, 12
Aristotle, 9, 10, 11–12, 20, 48, 58, 86, 87, 139, 146,
151, 162, 186, 187, 203, 210, 213, 226, 233, 240;
linguistic theories, 169
Arsewipe, 10, 18, 20, 114, 123, 127, 224, 234
Art and Architecture, 12, 133, 139, 140, 155, 184;
interest in, among other humanists, 38, 84; of
Renaissance, 127, 140, 243
Arveiller, Raymond, 23
Asclepiades, 12–13
Astrology and astrologers, 13–14, 58, 66, 194, 209;
in Almanachs, 5–6; Herr Trippa and, 1, 110, 223;
humanist fascination with, 187, 76, 169; warnings
against, 65, 93, 175, 187, 209, 227
Astronomy, 13, 24, 63, 164, 227
Atheneus, 228
Atkinson, Geoffroy, 249
Aubigné, Agrippa d’, 205
Augustine, Saint, 101, 102, 161, 185, 186, 229, 236,
243
Authority, challenge of, 224; of individuals and hu-
man reason, 158, 212; judicial and legal, 23, 111;
misplaced, 186, 191; patriarchal, 64, 94, 261; po-
litical, 50, 54, 194; pope’s claims to, 163, 181–82;
quest for, by Panurge, 223; respect for, 232; spiri-
tual, 31, 111, 113, 121, 128, 143, 163, 207, 207,
226, 233–34; textual, 10; of Third Book consult-
274 Index

ants, 110, 116; of tradition and the ancients, 11,
28, 98, 139, 143, 189
Averroes, 187
Avicenna, 187
Bacbuc, 15–16, 21, 35, 38, 77, 80, 138, 209, 236,
259, 262–65
Bacchic furor, 33
Bacchus, 12, 33, 78, 213, 259, 262
Bacon, Francis, 67
Badebec, 16, 47, 163, 173
Badius, Conrad, 225
Baisecul and Humesvesne, 16–17, 34, 41, 140–41,
143, 175, 181, 234
Baker, Mary, 195
Bakers and shepherds, 34, 63, 188, 225
Bakhtin, 17–19, 29, 44, 100, 104–5, 106, 122, 129,
130, 170, 174, 179, 190, 191, 210, 212, 225, 231,
235, 251; Panurge’s trickery as cosmic regenera-
tion, 180; on theory of novel, 170, 200
Banquet, 7, 33, 58, 133, 141, 143, 182, 198, 223,
262; of humanists, to honor Dolet, 56, 153; intel-
lectual and philosophical, 157, 182, 223; religious
connotations of, 33, 42, 125, 143, 182, 157, 182,
198, 223, 262
Baptism, 90, 111, 262
Baroque, 211, 261
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 206
Barrel, 41, 262. See also Tub, of Diogenes
Barthes, Roland, 45
Bartolus of Sassofarrato, 143
Basché, 18, 19, 35, 75, 157, 224
Beauce, forest of, 82, 99
Beaujour, Michel, 129
Beauvais, Vincent de, 10, 97
Béda, Noël, 19–20, 70, 134, 151, 208, 226, 233–34,
241
Bells, of Notre Dame, 93, 95, 134, 209, 218, 234
Belon, Pierre, 10
Bembo, Pietro, 127
Ben Geron, Levi, 15
Bérauld, Nicholas, 56
Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 20
Béroalde de Verville, 205
Berquin, Louis de, 31, 233
Berry, Alice Fiola, 24, 88, 90
Beza, Theodore, 205
Bien yvres (bien ivres), propos des, 197–98, 212,
262
Birds, 10, 12, 39, 59, 95, 214, 227, 253
Blazons (blasons), 39, 115, 212, 237, 245, 251
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 132, 225
Body, 20–21, 156–59, 163–64, 212, 216, 228; and
alchemy, 2; analogy of, in Praise of Debts, 2;
analogy with state, 49; in Bakhtin, 17–19; 44; of
Christ, 173, 216; female, 91; grotesque, 51–52,
104–5; knowledge of, 74; mutilated, 47; swelling,
103–4
Bon, François, 206
Boniface VIII, 50
Bonnivet, château de, 12, 243
Books, confiscation of, 31–32
Booth, Wayne, 45, 106, 252
Borrowings, 63, 142, 219, 222; from antiquity, 10,
125, 140, 145, 162, 164; Biblical and ecclesiasti-
cal, 209, 238; from French authors 15, 24, 51, 91,
94, 95, 125, 140, 163, 174, 212, 214; from He-
brew sources, 15, 34, 107; from Italian authors,
32, 38, 52, 172, 187; from medical manuals, 33,
212
Bosch, Hieronymus, 59, 205
Bottle, Divine, 21, 29, 35, 38, 39, 53, 64, 65, 79, 81,
141, 169, 236, 237, 242, 245, 246, 250, 258, 265;
oracle of, 77; temple of, 12, 80
Bouchard, Amaury, 42, 143
Bouchet, Guillaume, 205
Bouchet, Jean, 42, 58, 76, 144, 265
Bourbon, Nicolas, 56
Bourgeoisie, 49, 62, 191, 211
Bowen, Barbara, 7, 55
Boyssonné, Jean de, 42, 133
Bragmardo, Janotus de. See Janotus de Bragmardo
Brant, Sebastian, 40, 76, 81
Brasavola, 132
Braudel, Fernand, 62
Brault, Gérard, 131
Breughel, Pieter (the Elder), 59, 205
Briçonnet, Guillaume, 21–22, 70, 144, 185, 208
Bridé, Jobelin, 64, 71, 122, 234
Bridoye (Bridlegoose), 22–23, 40, 135–36, 143, 147,
223, 233, 245, 246, 247, 251; farcical elements of,
75; as fool, 81
Brief Declaration, 15, 23–24, 83, 90, 96, 150, 151,
155, 162, 170, 213, 215, 254
Bringuenarilles, 24, 55, 101, 162, 216
Brown, Huntington, 248
Bruegel, Peter. See Breughel, Pieter (the Elder)
Bucer, Martin, 7
Budé, Guillaume, 16, 24–25, 40, 41, 42, 56, 66, 84,
121, 122, 125, 132, 140, 143, 144, 145, 163, 189,
212; as legist, 132, 143; Rabelais’s correspon-
dence with, 41, 42, 144, 145; Rabelais’s debt to,
24, 41, 122, 125
Burckhardt, Jacob, 211
Burlesque, 32, 42, 73, 95, 104, 125, 172, 175, 177,
215, 219, 220, 221
Butor, Michel, 206

Cain and Abel, 100–104, 236
Calcagnini, Celio, 187
Calumny, 26–27, 42, 178–79
Calvin, John (Jean), and Calvinism, 27–28, 32, 51,
56–57, 207; attitude toward Rabelais, 73–74, 205;
criticized Catholic practices, 96, 113, 219–220;
Rabelais’s satire of, 26, 74, 152, 162, 205
Capitalism, rise of, 129, 159
Cardanus, Hieronymus, 222
Caritas, 50, 102, 221. See also Charity
Carnival, 2, 17, 28–29, 152, 250–52, 258; as an
agent of change, 141, 149; Bakhtin’s theories of,
17–19, 100, 106, 129, 130, 170, 225, 231, 252;
feasts associated with, 79–80; figures of, 95, 152;
Lent versus, 7, 80, 170; materialism of, 67; rever-
sal inherent in, 67, 131, 160, 229; spirit of subver-
sion and violence, 44, 183
Carpalim, 79, 176
Carpenter, Nan Cook, 164–65
Cartier, Jacques, 10, 29–30, 84, 98, 166, 170, 214,
222, 249
Cassade, Isle de (Isle of Lying Illusions), 82, 214
Castiglione, Baldassare, 30, 36
Catchpoles. See Chicanous
Cave, Terence, 5, 37, 41, 212, 235
Céard, Jean, 209
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 206
Censors, censorship, and censure, 30–32, 109–10,
178, 196, 226; related to charges of heresy and
executions, 57, 110–12, 208; revisions, as a result
of, 26, 134, 210; by the Sorbonne, 19, 26, 39, 73,
109, 148, 183, 234; of texts by other humanists,
19, 22, 39, 57
Cent nouvelles nouvelles, 179, 225
Cervantes, Miguel de, 32, 206
Chambre ardente, 57, 109, 184
Champier, Symphorien, 149, 218
Champlain, Samuel de, 250
Chaneph, 33, 90, 107, 146, 235
Charity, 33–34, 132, 156, 246; cornerstone of evan-
gelism and Pantagruelism, 73, 178, 246, 256;
demonstrated by Turks, 6; linked to borrowing
and lending, in Praise of Debts, 48; neglect of, 49–
50, 72, 118, 221; symbols and emblems of, 8
Charles V (emperor), 34, 59, 132, 194, 253; associ-
ated with Quaresmeprenant, 7, 162, 216, 75, 85;
identified with Picrochole, 92, 188, 235, 257; Ra-
belais’s mockery of, 122; rivalry with French
kings, 59, 109, 253
Charmois, Charles, 12
Charpentier, Françoise, 46
Charron, Pierre, 139
Chastillon (Châtillon), Cardinal of (Odet de Coli-
Index 275
gny), protector of Rabelais, 193; Rabelais’s dedi-
catory letter to, 26, 42, 53, 83, 109, 195, 196, 213
Chateaubriand, François René de, 128, 206
Chats fourrez, 63, 65, 135–36, 214
Cheli, 34–35, 107, 135, 219
Chesil. See Trent, Council of
Chicanous, 19, 35, 135, 161, 236
Chinon, 75, 77, 99–100, 128, 161, 259, 260
Chitterlings. See Andouilles
Chivalry, 85, 227
Cholières, Nicolas de, 205, 225
Christianization, of ancient thought, 48, 93, 173
Chroniques gargantuines. See Gargantuan Chroni-
cles
Church, the (Catholic), 214, 250; Rabelais and, 74;
resistance to reform of, 181
Cicero, 24, 35–36, 118, 139, 145; Ciceronian “quar-
rel,” 127–28, 140, 203; De amicitia, 86; De divi-
natione, 197; De republica, 151, 203, 213, 227,
261; as educational and rhetorical model, in
Renaissance, 63, 127, 139, 145, 213; letters of,
121, 127; and Quintilian, 127; rhetoric of, 134,
199, 201
Clement V (pope), 50
Clothes, 36, 95, 176, 231, 240; of Anarche, 7; color
of, 39; Gargantua’s livery, 9; Panurge’s, 7, 36,
232, 36, 115; symbolism of, 36, 90; at Thélème,
36, 244. See also Codpiece (or Braguette)
Clouzot, Henri, 126
Codpiece (or Braguette), 36, 37, 102, 217, 219;
abandoned, 52, 237; admiration of nursemaids,
171; associated with copia, 41; praise of, as rhe-
torical paradox or satirical eulogy, 72, 104–5, 167,
212; related to rebirth and reproduction, 167
Coligny, Odet de, Cardinal de Chastillon, 126, 83,
213
Collège de France, 84
Collège de Montaigu, 19, 151, 241
Collège des lecteurs royaux, 19, 107, 193, 234
Collin, Jacques, 30
Colonna, Francesco, 12, 37–38, 61, 77, 78, 115, 133,
262
Colors, 8, 38–39, 167; of clothes, 36, 103, 115, 232,
240; of flying pig, 8; of Frozen Words, 87
Comedy and comic elements, 11, 113, 131, 134,
141, 143, 157, 245–46
Commerce, 40, 62–63, 72, 140, 148, 155, 183, 187
Community, 39–40; change and purification of, 82,
111; of Christian humanists and persecuted Protes-
tants, 6, 188; ideal or model, 82–83, 241–42, 258;
of readers, 86, 166–67; return to, by hero, 258
Conscience, 73, 113, 116, 121, 139, 148, 168, 227–
28
Cooper, Richard, 145
276 Index
Copia, 5, 37, 41, 118, 146, 212. See also Cornucopia
Coq-à-l’âne, 17, 40–41, 148, 221
Cornucopia, 5, 37, 41, 118, 140–41, 146, 158, 212
Correspondence, 35, 39, 41–43, 145
Corrozet, Gilles, 65, 99
Cosmography, 98, 210, 227, 228, 249, 260
Cotgrave, Randle, 67, 75, 206
Couillatris, 43, 53, 82, 158–61, 183, 196, 203, 237
Counter-Reformation, 52, 250
Courtier, satire of, 30
Cousturier, Pierre, 226
Crenne, Hélisenne de, 61
Crétin, Guillaume, 202
Critical Theory, 43–46
Cuckoldry, 46, 59, 85, 180, 116, 215, 229, 246, 252
Culture, popular, 44, 100, 104, 129, 141, 165, 190–
91, 212, 231–32
Cuspidius, Lucius, will of (Ex reliquiis venerandae
antiquitatis Lucii Cuspidii Testamentum), 132
Dante, 8, 74, 108, 128, 144, 226
Death, 43, 47–48, 141, 150, 151, 154, 181, 189,
197, 202, 228, 237, 241, 252; of Badebec, 16; in
cycle, followed by reproduction, 167; of Guil-
laume du Bellay, 202; of Pan, 173
Deberre, Jean-Christophe, 49
Debt, 36, 102; forgiveness of, 3
Debts and debtors, praise of, 7, 48–49, 70, 76, 160,
212, 245, 222, 223, 260; alchemical analogies in,
2; allusions to deforestation and economics, 82; as
rhetorical paradox or satirical eulogy, 72, 81, 131
Decretals, 49–50, 53, 117, 147, 182, 204, 223; con-
nection to Frozen Words, 87–88; as satirical eu-
logy, 72
Dedications and dedicatory materials, 5; ironic, 218;
in learned editions, 42, 60, 247; for Quart livre
(1552), 26, 83, 109, 132, 143, 144, 145, 195–96,
213; to syphilitics and the gouty, 238; for Third
Book, 153, 193, 245
Defaux, Gérard, 45, 90, 129, 131, 134, 203, 233,
252, 260
Demonet, Marie-Luce, 15, 23
Derrida, Jacques, 44, 115
Deschamps, Eustache, 218
Des Périers, Bonaventure, 51, 225
Desprez, François, 205
Devils and Demonology, 26, 51–52, 79, 90, 143,
169, 235, 209; associated with trickster, 179–80;
false accusations of, 73, 221; in episode of Pap-
efigues, 180–82; on Island of Macreons, 47, 150,
151; origins of Pantagruel, 175, 246; powerless in
the face of God’s will, 5
Dialogue and dialogic elements, 10, 18, 30, 131,
140, 141, 245, 251; as approach to problem solv-
ing, 184; inspired by Lucian, 147, 163; Platonic,
140, 141, 190; in theories of Bakhtin, 18; 170;
widespread use of, in Renaissance, 18, 30, 47, 51,
56, 86, 140, 163
Dice, banning of, 89; for fortune telling, 94, 259; in-
vention of, 97; part of Panurge’s wardrobe, 179;
used for judgment and decision making, 22–23,
78, 135–36, 143, 163, 224, 247
Diéguez, Manuel de, 90
Dindenault (Dingdong), 10, 37, 40, 47, 52–53, 62,
180, 223, 251; burlesque, comical, and farcical el-
ements, 72, 75, 123, 157, 224; economic dimen-
sions, 62, 160–61
Diogenes, 49, 53–54, 70, 125, 262
Dionysius, the Pseudo-Aeropagite, 105
Dionysus (Bacchus), 141
Dipsodes and Dipsodie, 7, 54; lawless government
under Anarche, 176; meaning the “thirsty ones,”
borrowed from More, 197, 246, 255; Pantagruel
colonizes and institutes Utopian society, 34, 54,
133, 174–75; war against, by Amaurotes, 69, 146,
163, 224, 258
Disciple de Pantagruel, 24, 54–55, 65, 77, 142, 170,
205, 214
Dissection, medical, 20, 199; practice of, in sixteenth
century, 20; of Quaresmeprenant, 21, 199
Divination, 196–97; disapproval and skepticism to-
ward, 13, 58, 167, 187; methods of, 1, 58, 110,
169, 202, 245–46; as a possible route to knowl-
edge, 139
Dog(s), 4, 6, 55–56,127, 162, 179; Gargantua’s,
named Kyne, 4, 56; gnaw marrowbone, providing
a model for attentive reading, 91, 128; Plato’s
philosophical, 55, 169; pursue Haughty Lady of
Paris, 55, 106–7, 173; Ramus as, 203; in refer-
ences to Turks, 6, 9, 254; young Gargantua eats
from same bowl as, 123
Dolet, Etienne, 27, 56–57, 111, 149, 154, 193, 206;
editing and publishing activities of, 30, 55, 193;
execution of, for heresy, 57, 206; Rabelais and,
42, 153
Donne, John, 67
Don Quijote, 197
Doré, Gustave, 126, 206
Doré, Pierre, 56–57
Doremont, Jacques, 29
Doribus (D’Oribus, Dorisius), 56–57
Dream of Pantagruel (Le Songe de Pantagruel), 57–
58
Dream(s), 37–38, 57–58, 58–59, 190, 245; Hypnero-
tomachia Polyphili, allegorical dream vision (Co-
lonna), 37–38; Plotinus, theories on dream inter-
pretation, 190; as potential guide, 119;
psychoanalytical theory and, 6

Dreams of Daniel (Les Songes Daniel), 58
Du Bellay, Guillaume, 59–60, 132, 231, 234, 260,
261; death of, 48, 150, 202; goodness and gener-
osity of, 54
Du Bellay, Jean, 42, 54, 59, 60, 132, 144, 154, 181,
261
Du Bellay, Joachim, 40, 181
Du Bellay family, 26, 59, 60, 71, 150, 181, 188,
194, 208, 234
Duns Scotus, 226, 240
Dupuy Herbault, Gabriel, 205
Duval, Edwin, 33, 45, 50, 87, 90, 109, 177, 179,
194, 202, 203, 225, 236, 245
Ecolier Limousin, 61–62, 192, 200, 228; criticized
and punished by Pantagruel, 102, 134, 173; farci-
cal and comical elements in episode, 75, 175; Lat-
inisms of, 38, 173; satire of, 123, 217
Economy, 62–63; inflationary, 48, 159; life cycle as,
47–48; market, emergence of, 62, 212; monetary,
ills of, 160–161; utopian or idealized, 82, 160
Edict of Châteaubriant, 31
Education, 63–64; encyclopedic, 66, 201; freedom
and pleasure in, 70; Gargantua’s letter on, 131,
138, 201, 217; humanistic, 13, 18, 34, 71, 92,
131, 139, 144–45, 207, 217, 233, 259; regressive,
71, 175; scholastic, 80, 233, 234, 251
Emblems, 38, 64–65, 177, 262
Encomium, mock, 48, 81. See also Eulogy, satirical
Encyclopedism, 66–67, 201, 204; of erudition, in
Renaissance, 110; of genres, in novel, 170; of
Pantagruel’s education, 64
Engastrimythes, 95, 96, 236
England, 67–68
Enigmatic Prophecy, 68, 157, 197, 204, 217, 223,
244
Ennasin, 4, 68–69, 107–8, 123, 182
Ennius, 262
Entelechy, 11, 78
Epic, 118–19, 258; combined with other genres, 170–
71, 197; companion or comes, 86; episodes and
characteristics of, 108, 197, 240; hero or heroism,
79, 86, 113–14, 242; parody of, and deviations
from model, 72, 108, 113
Epistémon, 69–70; death and rebirth of, 197; en-
gaged as humanistic tutor, 64; loss of head, 20,
176; meaning “learned,” 176; netherworld journey
of, 53, 67, 108–9, 127, 147, 160, 171
Epitaph, 215, 239
Erasmus, Desiderius, 11, 24, 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41,
48, 50, 57, 69, 84, 70–71, 73, 78, 80, 89, 95, 102,
110, 127, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152,
153, 154, 163, 174, 186, 191, 193, 208, 219, 233,
240, 242; criticism of, 56; dialogism of, 18, 19;
Index 277
on education, 63; focus on Bible, 66; and folly, 81;
prose style, 62; Rabelais’s correspondence with,
144
Ercole II, Duke d’Este, 57
Estienne, Charles, 10, 99
Estienne, Henri, 205, 220
Estienne, Robert 15, 84
Estissac, Geoffroy d’, 42, 132, 144
Eudemon, 36, 71, 134
Eulogy, satirical, 50, 71–73, 76, 97, 131, 212
Eusthenes, 146, 176, 241
Evangelism, 50, 70, 73–74, 83, 116, 118, 128, 144,
148, 176, 207, 233, 242; and Briçonnet, 21; in
Enigmatic Prophecy, 68; as key to Rabelais’s
work, 129
Eyewitness, 2, 145, 166, 250
Fabliaux, 46, 179, 225, 275
Fairs, of Lyon, 100, 148, 155, 159
Fanfreluches antidotées, 41, 68, 75
Fantasy, 9, 11, 12, 24, 67, 99, 104, 147, 172
Farce, 40, 46, 72, 75–76, 140, 157, 170
Farce de Maistre Pathelin, 75, 108, 202, 250
Farel, Guillaume, 22
Farge, James, 31
Farnese, 181
Farouche, Isle, 181
Febvre, Lucien, 44, 105, 108–9
Ferrements, Isle des, 9, 81
Fezandat, Michel (ff. 1538–77), 76
Ficino, Marsilio, 48, 59, 76, 95, 96–97, 114, 144,
169, 187, 190; and androgyne, 9, 83
Fifth Book, 76–78; Bacbuc, 15–16; Bottle, 21; Ring-
ing Island, 213–14; use of Disciple, 54
Flaubert, Gustave, 128
Folengo, Teofilo, 51, 52, 78–79, 132
Folly, 81; associated with death, 47; in Erasmus, 70,
71; in Renaissance, 172
Food, 78, 79–81, 91, 130, 135, 141, 145, 152, 170;
carnivalesque use of, 27, 42; request for, by Pan-
urge, 179
Fool(s), 20, 70, 81,184; associated with carnival, 28;
Bridoye as, 22; Panurge as, 49; in Renaissance,
172; signified by andouille, 7
Forests, 81–82, 150
Foucault, Michel, 44, 159, 191
Fourth Book, 7–8, 19, 54, 66–67, 82–84, 86, 90
Fourth Books, prologues to, 26, 43, 53, 161, 195–96
Fox and lion, fable of, 82
Frame, Donald, 144
Francis I, 19, 34, 59, 60, 84–85, 121, 144, 148, 153,
184, 188, 193; crackdown on heresy, 57; supporter
of Rabelais’s books, 26, 29
Freccero, Carla, 46
278 Index

Free will, 13, 74, 187 Gray, Floyd, 90, 194

Frenzy or furor(s), 4, 33, 78, 80; Bacchic, 76
Frère Jean, 7, 33, 34, 35, 36, 53, 74, 85–86, 92, 125,
152, 160, 204; and army of cooks, 170; criticism
of Panurge, 174; founding of Thélème, 39; inter-
pretation of Enigmatic Prophecy, 68; scorn for
empty vows, 70; strength, wisdom, and heroics,
74
Frères Fredons, 77
Friendship, 18, 28, 34, 86, 94, 141, 153, 154
Frisch, Andrea, 195
Frozen Words, 4, 44, 83, 169; colors, 39; 69, 87–88,
120, 141
Frye, Northrop, 41
Furry Lawcats. See Chats fourrez
Galen, 13, 20, 80, 89, 105, 121, 156, 158, 164, 193,
199, 212, 215
Galland, Peter, 200, 203, 213
Gallet, Ulrich, 261
Gallicanism, 181, 182
Game(s), 191, 204, 244, 68, 89; rhetorical and tex-
tual, 129; tennis, 125
Ganabin, 33, 90, 107, 108, 235
Gargamelle, 79, 90–91, 103, 114, 122, 198, 220, 251
Gargantua, 91–93
Gargantua, 93–94; letter on education, to son Panta-
gruel, 63–64; livery of, 8, 36, 37, 38, 64, 131; ori-
gins, birth, and development of, 20, 34, 79, 91–
92, 100; reaction to wife’s death, 16, 47
Gargantua, prologue, 2, 3, 11, 26, 36, 55, 91, 127
Gargantuan Chronicles, 54, 94–95, 93, 127, 166,
174
Gaster, Messere, 18, 40, 76, 80, 83, 87–88, 95–96,
157, 168, 184
Gastrolastres, 80, 95, 96–97
Gender, questions of, 7–9, 182, 191, 192, 263–64
Genealogy, 75, 97, 185
Geography, 54, 97–100, 148
Gesner, Conrad, 10
Gestures, 169, 173, 180
Giants, 20, 24, 51, 100–101, 130, 173; evil, 147;
natural versus unnatural theories of, 167
Gifts, 94
Gilles, Pierre, 10
Glauser, Alfred, 87, 90
Golden Age, 7, 40, 102, 121, 147, 176
Goldmann, Lucien, 44
Goujon, Jean, 38
Grace and Free Will, 102–3, 113
Grandes Annales, 32
Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua. See Gargantuan
Chronicles
Grandgousier, 34, 103
Grève, Marcel De, 205
Grippe-Minaud, 136
Gross Medlars (P 1), 103–4
Grotesque, the, 20, 44, 104–5, 155, 158, 162, 199
Grotesque realism, 104–5, 164
Gryphius, Sebastian, 56, 64, 193
Guise, Cardinal de, 42
Guise, Claude de, Duke of Lorraine, 57
Gymnaste, 47, 53
Habert, François, 57–58, 67, 96
Hampton, Timothy, 6
Haughty Parisian Lady, 6, 52, 55, 75, 185, 192, 106–
7, 173, 175, 179, 183; defined by “otherness,” 6;
farcical elements of episode, 75; Petrarchist over-
tones and parody, 185; pursued by dogs, 55
Hearsay. See Ouy-Dire (Hearsay)
Heath, Michael, 24
Hebrew, 15, 19, 34, 69, 84, 107–8, 134–35, 144,
148, 170
Hell, 51–52, 53, 108–9, 160, 132, 188; Epistémon
in, 69
Henry II, 34, 57, 60, 109–10, 133, 196
Henry VIII, 19, 59, 85, 132,
Heresy, 30, 110–13, 144, 160, 163, 184, 196; accu-
sations against Rabelais, 26; related to humanism,
19; witch hunt to eradicate, 50, 84
Herodotus, 162
Hero(es) and heroism, 79 , 86, 113–14, 144, 150,
151, 197; death or deflation of, 167, 171, 172
Héroët, Antoine (1492?–1568?), 114
Her Trippa, 13, 110, 167; identification with Henry
Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1
Hesiod, 40, 95, 96
Hieroglyphs, 8, 24, 37, 38, 65, 114–16, 151, 155,
169, 195
Higman, Francis, 31
Hippocrates, 20, 58, 116, 132, 156, 193
Hippocrenas, 90
Hippothadée, 70, 73, 116–17, 144, 174
Holoferne, Thubal, 39, 64, 71, 73
Homenaz, 50, 53, 72, 117–18, 161, 182–83
Homer, 59, 87, 118–20, 127, 204
Horace, 157, 179
Horapollo, 115
Horns, 59
Hotel-Dieu, hospital, 89, 120, 149, 156
Huchon, 23, 94
Huguenots, 27
Hullot, Antoine, 42, 144, 145
Humanism, 37, 39, 44, 114, 118, 120–22, 134, 143,
175, 189; evangelical elements, 73; role in work,
17

Humor, 2, 30, 44, 74, 76, 122–24, 174, 194; Bakhti-
nian, 17–19; mixed with monstrosity, 83; as vehi-
cle for serious message, 74, 186
Hypocrisy, 33, 90, 202
Idleness, 125–26
Illustrations, 64, 126
Imitation, 126–27, 142, 155, 191
Indulgences, sale of, 69–70, 173, 182
Initiation, 90
Innocent VIII, 30
Interpretation(s), 8, 26, 44, 68, 96, 102, 127–30,
141, 144, 147, 151, 157, 158, 169, 170, 176–77,
194, 204
Inventions, 39, 197; gunpowder, 96
Irony, 130–32, 135, 183, 196
Isidore of Seville, 140
Italy, 30, 42, 132–33; influence, on Renaissance, 63
Jacobson, Roman, 141
Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, 11
Janotus de Bragmardo, 70, 134–35; farcical elements
of, 75
Janus, 8
Jeanneret, Michel, 44, 96
John XXII, 50
Judaism, 185
Judiciary, 135–37
Juste, François, 76, 137, 192, 193
Kabbala, 34–35, 66, 107, 138, 135, 187
Kaiser, Walter, 7
Kissarse. See Baisecul and Humesvesne
Knowledge, 66, 138–39, 156, 158, 168, 179, 187;
and Aristotle, 11; concept of, 44; in evangelism,
74; as remedy for ills, 34; zoological, 9
Krailsheimer, Alban, 7
Kristeva, Julia, 6
Kyne (Gargantua’s dog), 56
La Bruyère, 128
Lacan, Jacques, 45
La Fontaine Jean de, 202
Landscape/Geography, 191
Language(s), 24, 23, 35, 41, 44, 50, 95, 75, 115,
127, 130, 138, 139, 140–42, 143, 146, 155, 179,
193, 200, 204; Baisecul and Humevesne, 17; and
difference, 6; on Ennasin, 68–69; explored in
Fourth Book, 83; in Folengo, 79; foreign, study
of, 63, 175; in Frozen Words, 87–88; gestures as,
169; Hebrew, 107; as hero of novel, 170, 199; to
impress others, 173; of Limousin schoolboy, 62;
of narrator, 3; of Panurge, 69, 179; of Sorbonne,
39
Index 279
Lanternes, country of, 77
Lanternois, 55, 142
Lantern Queen, 36
Latin, misuse of, 62, 134, worship of, 140
Laughter, 5, 11, 80, 83, 106–7, 141
Laurel, 185
Lavatori, 160
Law, 24, 42, 49, 127, 135–37, 142–44, 183, 184,
186, 187; Baisecul and Humevesne, 16–17, 175;
Bridoye, 22–23; Rabelais’s own study of, 143;
study of, 63
Le Clerc, Nicolas, 32
Lecteurs royaux, 19, 123
Lefebvre, Henri, 44
Lefebvre d’Etaples, 19, 22, 40, 70, 73, 84, 144–45
Lefranc, Abel, 29, 44, 128, 202
Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 20, 96, 101, 104, 140, 202
Lent, 7; as carnival figure, 28
Leonardo da Vinci, 84
Le Rouille, Guillaume, 143
Letter(s), 35, 41, 86, 139, 144; between Pantagruel
and his father, 10, 13, 35, 47, 71, 73, 129, 144,
154, 187, 175, 204; Rabelais to Budé, 24
Library. See Saint-Victor, Library of
Limousin schoolboy. See Ecolier Limousin
Lists, 23, 89, 118, 145–46, 199
Losse, Deborah N., 194
Loup Garou (Werewolf), 101, 146, 176
Love, 114; in marriage, 1; and Neoplatonism, 4, 76,
95, 96, 114
Lucian, 40, 67, 70, 71, 78, 108, 118, 125, 140, 142,
147–48, 157, 163, 164, 166; in Renaissance, 172
Luther, Martin, 8, 69, 102, 148, 147, 154, 181, 185;
justification by faith alone, 185
Lutherans and Lutheranism, 7, 79, 84, 109, 148, 171,
202
Lying Illusions, island of. See Cassade, Isle de (Isle
of Lying Illusions)
Lyon, economy of, 62; other humanists in, 56;
publications in, 42, 54, 65, 148–49, 156, 192
Machiavelli, 150, 188
Macreons, Isle of, 12, 24, 38, 47, 82, 150–51, 197;
and Pan, death of, 173
Macrin, Salmon, 42, 56, 60
Macrobe, 150, 151, 197
Macrobius, 151; Dream of Scipio, 58
Madness, and Neoplatonism, 4
Magic, 59, 66, 76, 110; in writings of Agrippa, 1
Magnus, Olaus, 11
Maillezais, monastery of, 147
Major (Maioris, Mair), John (1467–1550), 151–52
Manardi, Giovanni, 132, 144
Manetti, Giovanni, 64
280 Index
Manutius, Aldus, 38
Marcourt, Antoine, 188
Mardigras, 8, 28, 152
Marguerite de Navarre, 19, 22, 32, 39, 47, 56, 73,
114, 144, 148, 153, 185, 193
Marliani, 60
Marliani, Giovanni, 132
Marot, Clément, 40, 56, 73, 84, 140, 148, 149, 153–
54, 185
Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam, 90
Marriage, 13, 46, 56, 85, 153, 154–55, 174, 157, 181;
analogous with government, 9; and androgyne, 9;
based on love, 1; clandestine, 94; of clergy, 57;
consultations on, 22–23; in Ennasin, 68–69; ra-
tionale of, 49; versus masculine friendship, 86
Marrow, 5, 18, 55, 79, 91, 118, 127, 130, 155, 169,
183, 204
Martin, Jean, 38
Marx and Marxist criticism, 49, 129
Mass, 7, 33, 85, 95
Masters, G. Mallary, 9, 169
Masuccio, 132
Mayerne, Jean de (Turquet), 77, 78
McLuhan, Marshall, 203–4
Meaux, 21, 22, 144, 185
Medamothi, 12, 40, 155–56
Medici family, 181
Medicine, 20, 42, 59, 66, 80, 120, 127, 139, 140,
156–57, 183, 186, 199; and alchemy, 1–2; Ascle-
piades, 12–13; Galen, 89; Hippocrates, 116; study
of, 63; text and reading as, 159, 204
Medigo, Elia del, 187
Mediocritas. See Moderation (mediocritas)
Melanchthon, 71, 116
Menippean paradox, 157–58
Menippus, 147
Mercury, 43, 58, 173
Messere Gaster. See Gaster, Messere
Metz, 42, 60, 111, 193
Meung, Jean de, 140
Michelangelo, 127
Michelet, Jules, 128, 140
Mock epic, 64, 78, 126–27, 172, 174
Moderation (mediocritas), 8, 13, 27, 43, 53, 80, 158–
59, 162, 196, 253
Money, 24, 48–49, 62, 159–61, 184, 240, 257; cri-
tique of, as immoral, 48; as sign, 159; Rabelais’s
request for, from patron, 144–45
Monks, as fearful, 39, 84; as gluttonous and greedy,
39, 92; for their idleness, 74, 84, 96, 125; satire
of, 76, 79, 85, 202, 204, 209, 257
Monsters, 20, 51–52, 69, 74, 77, 98, 101, 146, 147,
152, 162, 161–63, 167, 181, 186, 187, 189, 19; as
allegories of Rabelais’s enemies, 269; Gargantua’s
mare, 9; and otherness, 6
Monstrelet, Enguerrard de, 119
Montaigne, 24, 41, 74, 128, 139, 194, 200, 205, 210–
11, 227–28, 255
Montaigu, Collège de, 19, 151, 241
Montpellier, 56, 75, 135, 156, 215, 260
Moon, journey or ascent to, 168, 172, 176
More, Sir Thomas, 40, 54, 73, 89, 141, 147, 163,
174
Motteux, Peter A., 67, 247–48
Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s, 29, 163–64, 166, 176,
189; Bringuenarilles, 24; meaning of Badebec’s
name, 16
Music, 140, 164–65; divine, 87; instruments, 59; part
of education, 63
Myrelingues, 22, 23
Narrative, 147; development of, in Renaissance, 32
Narrator, 166–67, 169, 185, 191, 194–95, 204; Al-
cofrybas, 2–3, 91; as character, 166, 176; unrelia-
ble, 172
Natural history, 33
Nature, 162, 167–69, 187, 189; and animals, 9; per-
version of, 74
Navigation, 55
Nazdecabre, 53, 169
Neoplatonism, 59, 65, 76, 96, 114, 131, 138, 139,
169–70, 190; and alchemy, 1; and allegory, 3
Niphleseth, 7, 98, 152, 170, 182
Noah, 101, 104
Noses, 2, 68–69, 182
Notre-Dame, bells of, 134, 218
Nourry, Claude, 56, 143, 170
Novel, development of in Rabelais, 170–71, 200
Numbers, symbolism of, 8
Nursemaids, 3, 171
Obscenity, 32
Occult, the, 168, 172; and Agrippa, 1; knowledge, 66
Odes, Isle of, 77, 99
Odysseus, 175
Olivétan, Pierre, 51
Orlando furioso (Roland Furieux), 172
Orme, Philibert de l’, 12, 126
Orpheus, 87
Ory, Matthieu, 31, 56–57
Ouy-Dire (Hearsay), 98, 222–23
Ovid, 71, 204
Pagnino, Sante, 15
Pan, death of, 24, 48, 150, 173; in Songe, 58
Panigon, 34
Pantagruel, 173–74; advice of, 59; advice to Pan-
urge, 54; birth, 16, 20, 127; as Christ figure, 3; as
contrasted with Panurge, 174; education and learn-
ing of, 66; exploits of, 143, 181; as King of the

Thirsty, 7; meeting with Panurge, 131; Paradise,
false, 96; plea to God and work during storm, 74;
relationship with Panurge, 86; ships of, 21; in
Songe, prospective marriage of, 58; tears of, 173
Pantagruel, 174–76
Pantagruel, prologue to, 172, 194–95
Pantagrueline Prognostication, 5, 13
Pantagruelion, 50, 70, 101, 176–78; as laurel, of self-
glorification, 177, 186; as satirical eulogy, 72, 81;
symbolic of control over nature, 168
Pantagruelism, 27, 34, 68, 82, 178–79, 186
Panurge, 52, 179–80; advice to, from Frère Jean, 85;
as antipode of Gargantua, 93; in Bakhtinian criti-
cism, 18; clothing of, 36; and Dindenault, 52–53;
dreams, 59; education of, 63–64; fear, 74, 90;
feats of, 175–76; and Haughty Lady, 55; hero of
Disciple, 55; meeting with Pantagruel, 131; name,
24; obscene gestures of, 66; praise of debts, 48–49;
receives Salmagundi, 54; relationship with Panta-
gruel, 86; resuscitates Epistemon, 176; revives Ep-
istemon, 108; in Songe, 57–58; as sophist, 173;
stories, 146; tricks (Haughty lady), 106–7, 175,
179; as trickster, 251–52; weakness, fear, and
flaws, 74, 103
Papacy, 101, 148, 180–81
Papefigues, 40, 53, 73, 83, 181
Papimanes and Papimanie, 40, 50, 53, 73, 83, 117–
18, 133, 152, 161, 181–83
Paracelsus, 78
Paradox, 4, 44, 71, 147, 158, 177, 182; in Renais-
sance texts, 172; and revelation, 183
Paré, Ambroise, 10
Paris, Jean, 44, 48
Paris: Pantagruel’s exploits in, 16; printing in, 64, 65;
satire of, 134; students in, 61–62; walls of, 4, 18,
183–84, 188, 192
Parlement, 16, 19, 21, 109, 148, 184, 195, 196; ban
on sales of books, 26; effort to reform, by Francis
I, 84; persecution of “heretics,” 57; restrictions on
printing, 31; satirized by Rabelais, 73
Parnassus, Mount, and Antiparnassus, 90
Parody, 32, 50, 62, 80, 94, 96, 123, 126–27, 128,
147; of alchemical model, in Praise of Debts, 2;
of courtly love, 106; in Gaster episode, 83; in
prognostications, 5
Pasquier, Estienne, 62, 202
Pathelin, Farce of, 202
Patriarchy, 93–94, 131
Paul, St., 8, 33, 70, 71, 72, 96, 102, 131, 144, 184–
85
Paul III, 60
Pavia, Battle of, 34, 85
Pellicier, Guillaume, 42
Perrière, Guillaume de la, 65
Petrarch/Petrarchism, 63, 84, 127, 151, 185–86
Index 281
Pharmakon athanasias. See Philosopher’s Stone
Philautia, 70, 110, 186
Philosopher’s Stone, 1, 2, 176
Physetere, 4,11, 69, 162, 181, 186–87; and Pliny, 10
Physis and Antiphysie, 186, 187
Picaresque elements, 175
Picart, 126
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 5, 13, 105, 135,
138, 144, 187
Picrochole, 10, 85, 103, 128, 184, 188; as Charles
V, 34; as Noël Béda, 19
Picrocholine War, 18, 82, 92, 99
Pig, flying, 8, 182. See Mardigras
Pilgrims, 4, 73
Placards, Affair of, 128, 152, 183, 188; effect on
Francis I, 84; repercussions of, 31
Plague, 189
Plato, 8, 11, 40, 49, 55, 63, 76, 86, 87, 96, 114, 115,
118, 129, 131, 139, 140, 141, 155, 177, 187, 190;
linguistic theories, in Cratylus, 169
Platonism, 78, 152
Play, of signs and text, 160, 169, 194
Pliny, 10, 13, 101, 140, 162, 168, 176, 189
Plotinus, 169, 190
Plutarch, 40, 48, 118, 140, 150, 173, 197
Poliziano, Angelo, 66
Polycletus, 12
Ponocrates, 71, 80, 89
Postel, Guillaume, 51
Poverty, 96
Power and disempowerment, discourses of, 191–92,
196
Priapus, 43, 203
Primaticcio, 12
Prince, Christian, ideal of, 9
Printing and publishing, 56, 76, 95, 98, 137, 148,
167, 188, 192–93, 204; and censorship, 30–32;
and circulation of ideas, 30; promotes reassess-
ment of dogmas, 107
Prisoners, treatment of, 150, 193
Procuration, 35
Prognostications, 5, 13, 167, 194, 197, 202
Progress, 176, 193
Prophecy, 4, 196–97, 202. See also Divination
Propos des Bien Ivres, Les, 197–98
Providence, 22, 23
Psychoanalytical theory, 6
Ptolemy, 5, 11, 97, 162
Puy-Herbault, Gabriel de, 26, 27, 73
Puy-Saint-Martin, Monastery of, 143
Quaresmeprenant, 7, 21, 28, 39, 40, 73, 146, 152,
157, 162, 173, 181, 187, 199–200
Quart d’heure de Rabelais, 42
Queneau, Raymond, 63, 200
282 Index

Querelle des femmes, 46, 114, 154 95, 127, 147, 152, 162, 174, 223–24; antimonacal,
Quintessence, abstractor of, 3; in alchemy, 1, 28; 79; of justice system, 76; linguistic, 62; new hy-
kingdom of, 2, 24, 77; Queen, 38, 77 brid form of, 76; in Renaissance mock epics, 172;
Quintilian, 66, 200–201, 203 Saturn, 102
Saulnier, Verdun-Louis, 33, 54, 71, 90, 129, 150,
Rabelais, Théodule, 133 177, 223
Raminagrobis, 40, 47, 202–3, 203 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 45, 115
Ramus, 200, 202, 203 Savanarola, Girolamo, 187
Reading, 2, 26, 44, 55, 65, 68, 106, 125, 130, 131, Scaliger, 59
146, 151, 156, 180, 189, 197, 203–4 Scatology, 18, 35, 67, 72, 76, 79, 90, 100, 104, 179,
Realism, 9, 44, 53, 99, 104–5. See also Grotesque 224–25
realism Scève, Maurice, 185
Reception and influence, in England, 67–68 Scholasticism, 12, 19, 37, 118, 144, 151, 183, 189,
Reception and influence, in France, 205–6 226–27; education of, 63, 71; satire of, 16
Recreation. See Game(s); Idleness Schwartz, Jerome, 9
Reform, 21, 22, 182 Science, 44, 139, 140, 152, 168, 203, 227–28; ad-
Reformation, 57, 73–74, 102–3, 109, 121, 154, 181, vances in, effect on society, 82; meaning of, in
183, 188, 206–7; and witchcraft, 52 sixteenth century, 168; in Renaissance, reflected in
Religion, 21, 22, 24, 27, 57, 73, 85, 102–3, 110–13, Rabelais’s study of, 63
117–18, 121, 127, 142, 154, 163, 188, 190, 207– Sciomachie, 39, 42, 133
10; critique of, 51; of Frère Jean, 85; and medi- Screech, M. A., 9, 30, 48, 87, 91, 129, 144, 198
cine, 156; of Rabelais, 74; relationship to science, Sébillet, Thomas, 40
168; in upheaval, in sixteenth-century France, 173 Servetus, Michael, 57
Renaissance, 20, 38, 183, 189, 210–12; economy of, Seuilly, Abbey of, 3, 85
62; education in, 63; love of emblems, 66 Shakespeare, 68, 128
Renée de France, 57, 153 Shrovetide. See Quaresmeprenant
Reuchlin, Johann, 15, 135, 240 Sibyl, 52, 53, 186, 229–30
Rhetoric, 36, 37, 48, 49, 50, 55, 66, 71, 72, 106, Sidney, Philip, 67
118, 129, 131, 134, 166, 179, 194–95, 196, 199, Signs, 13, 38–39, 141, 159, 169, 180, 197; ambigu-
200, 203, 212–13; Latin, 42; of Pantagruelion epi- ous, 48, 441
sode, 177; Petrarchist, 185; scholastic, 63 Sileni, 2, 11, 155, 157, 169, 195, 204, 230; and
Rigolot, François, 45, 129–30, 131, 141, 195 Erasmus, 70; and Neoplatonism, 169
Ringing Island, 77, 133, 213–14; colors of birds on, Sisyphus, 54
39 Skepticism, 158, 230–31
Rodilardus, 51, 90 Smith, Pauline, 30
Romance, 170 Smith, Paul J., 90
Roman de la rose, 3, 46 Social Class, 231–32
Romantic era, 128 Socrates, 91
Rondelet, Guillaume, 10 Songe de Pantagruel (Dream of Pantagruel), 57–58
Rondibilis, 40, 214–15 Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, 126
Ronsard, 41, 196, 215 Sophist(s), 232–33; Panurge as, 49, 173
Roussel, Gérard, 19 Sorbonne, 6, 19, 22, 48, 60, 70, 111, 134, 144, 148,
Royal privilege, 26, 193, 196 153, 183, 184, 189, 193, 195–96, 233–34; and
Ruach, 34, 107, 135, 138, 162, 215–16 censorship, 30–32; conflict with Francis I, 31; ef-
fort to control, by Francis I, 84; independence
Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, 30, 68, 75, 84, 217 from Rome, 181; lambasted by Rabelais, 26, 39,
Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, secularization of, 39 73; Socrates, 182
Saints, 73, 100, 113, 184, 185, 189 Soul, immortality of, 173
Saint-Victor, Library of, 32, 56, 67, 78, 127, 132, Spitzer, Leo, 44, 128
143, 149, 175, 217–18 Sporades, 234–35
Saints, imaginary, 218–19 Standonck, Jan, 19
Saints, real, 219–21 Starobinski, Jean, 45
Salmigondin, Chastellany of, 7, 48, 54, 221–22 Sterne, Laurence, 68
Satin, pays de, 77, 222–23; animals, 10–12 Stones, precious, 8, 12, 50, 59
Satire, 10, 11, 13, 16, 20, 40–41, 49, 70, 72, 79, 92, Stratagemes, Les, 133

Swift, Jonathan, 68
Symbolic System, 235–38
Symbolism, 68–69; of colors, 38–39; in Fifth Book,
38; of Mardigras, 8; of numbers, 8
Symbols, 169; and allegory, 3; colors, 38–39
Syncretism, 157, 187
Syphilis (la vérole), 43, 156, 158–59, 238
Tahureau, Jacques (1527–55), 239
Taine, Hippolyte, 44
Tapinois, 173
Tarande, 10, 239–40
Tartareti (Tartaret, Tateret), Pierre (c. 1460–1522),
240
Tempest or Storm, 33, 69, 74, 79, 150, 168, 181,
197, 240; debt to Erasmus, 70; different reactions
to, 174
Tempête, Pierre, 151–52, 241
Tetel, Marcel, 87, 90, 159
Thalamège, 24, 40, 82, 142, 160, 241–42
Thamous, 150–51, 173
Thaumaste, 13, 37, 66, 86, 163, 168, 173, 175, 180,
242; farcical elements of episode, 75, 190
Theatrical elements, 19, 75
Thélème, 38, 45, 74, 92, 128, 154, 160, 161, 204,
243–44; architecture of, 12; carnivalesque and, 18;
clothing, 36, 39; as community, 39; exclusions
from, 4; geography of, near forest, 82; illustra-
tions, 65; recreation at, 125; utopian elements, 54
Thenaud, Jean, 107
Theology, Faculty of. See Sorbonne
Thévet, André, 10, 98
Thibault, Jean, 58
Third Book, 245–46; printing and editions of, 76;
prologue to, 11
Thirst, 13, 130, 246–47
Till Eulenspiegel, 175, 179
Tilley, Arthur, 87
Tiraqueau, André, 11, 41–42, 132, 144, 247
Tobit, book of, 4, 56,
Tocquedillon, 103
Tohu and Bohu, 34
Toolmaking Island, 9
Torchecul. See Arsewipe
Tory, Geoffroy, 24, 38, 62, 74
Tournes, Jean de, 185
Tournon, François de, Cardinal, 42
Tours, Pierre de, 82, 137
Translations, Dutch and German (16th–17th Centu-
ries), 247–48
Translations, English, 245, 255
Travel Literature, 10, 39, 98, 166, 214, 249–50
Trent, Council of, 133, 142, 148, 152, 153, 181, 250
Triboullet, 21, 40, 53, 70, 75, 81, 85, 245–46, 250–
51
Index 283
Trickster, 52, 79, 119, 131, 157, 175, 179–80, 251–52
Trinquamelle, 22–23, 247
Tripet, 47
Trithemius, 1, 110
Trouillogan, 22, 75, 139, 157, 231, 252–53
Tub, of Diogenes, 49, 54, 104, 125
Turks, 6, 9, 57, 109, 175, 179, 253–54, 257
Underworld, journey to, 20, 108–9
Unicorns, 9, 10, 222, 239
Urquhart, Thomas, 67, 247, 248, 255
Utopia, 29, 54, 92, 176, 255–56
Utopia, 54
Vachon, François de, 1
Valla, Lorenzo, 200
Vatable, François, 22
Vergerius, 63
Vesalius, Andreas, 20
Villanovanus, Simon, 56
Villon, 19, 140, 151, 257
Violence, 19, 79, 106, 176, 257–58; of Pantagruel,
62; of Panurge, 180; of text, 195
Virgil, 59, 127, 258–59
Virtues, cardinal, 48; theological, 48
Vives, Juan Luis, 59, 63, 154
Voltaire, 128
Voyage, 29, 48, 53, 54. 98, 138, 146, 155, 186, 197,
259–60; accounts of, 10; of exploration, commis-
sioned by French crown, 84; as narrative premise
of Fourth Book, 82; and otherness, 6
Walls, of Paris, 4, 18, 20, 150, 183
War, 34, 62, 92, 188, 261; Pantagruel and, 174–75;
waged by France, 84
Wars of religion, 27, 83, 109
Wechel, Chrétien, 64, 192, 193, 261–62
Werewolves, 147. See also Loup Garou (Werewolf)
Wind, 24, 33, 41, 107, 138
Wine, 80, 85, 101, 134, 262–63; advocated by As-
clepiades, 12, 13; in allegory, 3, 21; in Fifth Book,
15; and Neoplatonism, 4
Witchcraft, 52
Women, 45, 91, 106–7, 130, 154, 263–64; in
Agrippa, 1; and alterity, 6; in Aristotle, 11; exclu-
sion, 30; Panurge and, 174
Word, of the Bottle, 15, 21, 87, 141
World in Pantagruel’s Mouth. See Mouth, World in
Pantagruel’s
Xenomanes, 265; as narrator, 90, 146, 162, 199
Zegura, Elizabeth Chesney, 45, 49, 159
Zeuxis, 12
Zwingli, Ulrich, 7
 About
the Contributors
KENNETH ALBALA is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at the
University of the Pacific. He is the author of Eating Right in the Renaissance and Food
in Early Modern Europe and is currently working on a culinary history of the sixteenth
century.

MARY J. BAKER is a Professor of French at the University of Texas at Austin.

CATHLEEN M. BAUSCHATZ is Professor of French at the University of Maine, where

she teaches courses in French literature and civilization. She has published numerous
articles on French Renaissance literature.

JONATHAN BECK is Professor of French at the University of Arizona and Chercheur

associé at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours).

EDWARD BENSON wrote a dissertation thirty years ago on Rabelais’s martial meta-
phors, for the eponymous Harcourt Brown. Since then, he has taught at the universities
of Rhode Island and New Mexico, and will end his career in the foreseeable future at
the University of Connecticut, where he teaches French and film, and directs the Critical
Language Program. He wrote a book on money and magic in Montaigne, and is now
working on one on Henri-Georges Clouzot.

DOUGLAS L. BOUDREAU is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of World

Languages and Cultures at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. He received his
Ph.D. in 1999 from the Ohio State University. He has delivered conference papers on
both Francophone and Renaissance topics and has previously published an article on
Rabelais and one on Québecois author Anne Hébert.

BARBARA C. BOWEN is English by birth but spent her entire teaching career in the
United States. She has published on Rabelais, Montaigne, and many other Renaissance
topics. After twenty-five years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and
fifteen at Vanderbilt University, she is now retired and happily pursuing research into
different aspects of Renaissance comedy, including theatrical farce, humanist satire, scat-
ological jokes, and of course François Rabelais.

BRUNO BRAUNROT was born in Warsaw and educated in Paris and Montreal. He
holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from McGill University and received his Ph.D. from Yale
University in 1970. Dr. Braunrot has taught at McGill University and the University of
Virginia, before joining the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Georgia
State Unversity, where he is presently Professor of French and Director of Graduate
286 About the Contributors

Studies. He is the author of L’imagination poétique chez Du Bartas and, more recently,
François Rabelais, a Reference Guide 1950–1990 (1994).

POLLIE BROMILOW holds a B.A. and M.A. from Royal Holloway, University of
London, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She was recently appointed to
a permanent lectureship in French at the University of Liverpool.

EMILY BUTTERWORTH is Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, UK. She

has published on seventeenth-century polemic and satire and is currently working on a
book on slander in the early modern period.

KATIA CAMPBELL, who completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University, is Associate

Professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She writes on Hebrew and
Jewish elements in Rabelais’s epic novels.

EDMUND J. CAMPION is a Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, Knox-

ville, where he has taught since 1977. His research interests deal with classical French
literature and the influence of Erasmus on French Renaissance writers. His major
publications include his 1995 book Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Readers of Eras-
mus and three critical editions of tragedies by Philippe Quinault.

CAROL CLARK is Fellow and Tutor in French at Balliol College, Oxford. She has
published on Rabelais and Montaigne, and recently also on Baudelaire. She is the trans-
lator of “La Prisonnière” in a new edition of Proust.

TOM CONLEY, author of The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern
France (1996) and L’inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000),
teaches in the departments of Romance Languages and Visual/Environmental Studies at
Harvard University.

MEGAN CONWAY is a Professor of French at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Her major interests include women writers of the French Renaissance. She is currently
editing the upcoming volume on Sixteenth Century French Writers for the Dictionary of
Literary Biography.

RICHARD COOPER is Professor of French at Oxford University and a Fellow of Bra-

senose College. His particular field of interest is relations between France and Italy in
the Renaissance. He has published on the principal authors of the French Renaissance,
especially Rabelais, Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, du Bellay and Montaigne, and is
bringing out a book on antiquities in Renaissance France and editions of Marguerite and
Montaigne.

ROGER CRAIK teaches English at Kent State University Ashtabula Campus. Although
his doctoral work was on Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, he now writes mainly about
contemporary poetry.

JOANN DELLANEVA is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

at the University of Notre Dame. She has a particular interest in Renaissance love poetry,
Franco-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, women writers of the Renaissance,
 About the Contributors 287

the theory and practice of literary imitation, and the phenomenon of European Petrarch-
ism. She has written on a number of Renaissance poets (including Marot, Scève, Du
Guillet, du Bellay, Ronsard) as well as on imitation theory.

PHILIPPE DESAN is Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Lan-

guages and Literatures and the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of
Chicago. Among other titles, he has published Les commerces de Montaigne (1992),
Montaigne dans tous ses etats (2001), L’imaginaire économique de la Renaissance
(2002) and the Dictionnaire de Montaigne (2004). He is also the editor of the journal
Montaigne Studies and the director of the Chicago Renaissance Center.

DIANE DESROSIERS-BONIN, William Dawson Scholar in Renaissance Studies,

teaches sixteenth-century French literature at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her
numerous publications on Rabelais include Rabelais et l’humanisme civil (1992), “Ra-
belais et la nature féminine” (ER 31), and “Macrobe et les âmes héroı̈ques (Rabelais,
Quart Livre, chapitres 25 à 28)” (RAR 11). Since 1992, she has also supervised a research
team on French women writers of the sixteenth century.

LANCE DONALDSON-EVANS has taught sixteenth-century French literature at the

University of Pennsylvania since 1968. He has published books on the poetry of Jean
de La Ceppède and eye imagery in the poetry of the École de Lyon. He has also done
critical editions of four late-sixteenth–early-seventeenth-century devotional poets and
written articles on travel literature and its influence on Rabelais and on clothing in French
Renaissance literature.

EDWIN M. DUVAL is a Professor and Chair of French at Yale University. He has

written many articles on French Renaissance authors, including Rabelais, Marot, Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Scève, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné. His books include a three-volume
study of form and meaning in the works of Rabelais. His current research is devoted to
the relation between musical form, poetic structure, and logical articulation in French
Renaissance lyric.

JAMES K. FARGE is Senior Fellow and Librarian of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, Toronto. He has published several books concerning the University of Paris, its
personnel, and its interaction with religious and cultural changes in early modern France.

CARLA FRECCERO is Professor of Literature, Women’s Studies, and the History of

Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is the author of Father
Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (1991) and Popular Culture:
An Introduction (1999); and has published numerous articles on early modern culture,
feminist and queer theory, and U.S. popular culture. She is currently completing a book
on early modernity and queer theory.

ANDREA FRISCH teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of

Southern California. Her book, The Invention of the Eyewitness (2003) is a study of the
rhetoric of testimony in the sixteenth century.

MAX GAUNA is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Sheffield.

He has published critical editions of Jacques Tahureau’s Dialogues and Bonaventure des
Périers’s controversial Cymbalum Mundi. He has also written books on Montaigne’s
288 About the Contributors

religion and on his ethics, on the interpretation of Rabelais’s myths, and on free thought
in the literature of the French Renaissance.

AMY C. GRAVES is a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages at the University of

Chicago and a Junior Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her thesis on
the mémoires of Simon Goulart (1543–1628) explores Calvinist Renaissance historiog-
raphy during the Wars of Religion to ascertain their function as propaganda, as a juridical
praxis of history writing, and as the new model of time and information that inspired
the transition from occasionnel to the périodique in the early seventeenth century.

MATTHEW GUMPERT is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University and Coordinator

of the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas. He received his B.A. in Comparative
Literature from Princeton University (1984) and his M.A. and Ph. D., also in Comparative
Literature, from Harvard University (1992). He has taught in departments of Comparative
Literature and Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of
Wisconsin–Madison. Professor Gumpert’s book Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the
Classical Past, has recently been published.

MARGARET HARP is Associate Professor of French at the University of Nevada, Las

Vegas. Her current research project is on illustrated editions of Rabelais’s works.

E. BRUCE HAYES is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at

the University of Kansas. He is completing a book project that examines contemporary
farce and its function in Rabelais’s work.

MICHAEL J. HEATH is Professor of French Literature at King’s College London. He

has produced a student edition of the Quart Livre (1990) and a monograph, Rabelais,
for the MRTS Renaissance Masters series (1996). He is a major contributor to the To-
ronto University Press Collected Works of Erasmus.

FRANCIS HIGMAN studied modern languages at Oxford University, where he presented

his thesis on John Calvin’s French style. His research interests center on the French
Reformation and its contribution to the modern French language, questions of bibliog-
raphy and of censorship. From 1988 to 1998 he was director of the Institute for the
History of the Reformation in Geneva University. In retirement he continues to prepare
editions of Calvin’s works and some bibliographical studies.

MIREILLE HUCHON is Professor of French at the Université de Paris–IV Sorbonne.

Her numerous publications on Rabelais and sixteenth-century literature include Rabelais
grammarien: De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, ER 16 (1981). She is
also the editor of Rabelais’s Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (1994).

WILLIAM H. HUSEMAN, who received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, is an

Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Modern Lan-
guages, Literature, and Linguistics. He is the author of La personnalité littéraire de
François de la Noue (1985) and his research focuses upon sixteenth-century prose and
poetry, the French Wars of Religion, religious tolerance and intolerance, and conceptual
metaphors and iconography used by Latin Christian writers to describe and combat heresy
from the Apostolic era to the Renaissance.
 About the Contributors 289

ROBIN IMHOF is a Reference Librarian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton,

California. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

NEIL KENNY teaches early modern French literature and intellectual history at the
University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Palace of Secrets: Béroalde de Verville
and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge (1991), Curiosity in Early Modern Europe:
Word Histories (1998), and The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany
(forthcoming).

VIRGINIA KRAUSE is Associate Professor of French Studies at Brown University. She

is the author of Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance and is
presently working on confessional practices during the Renaissance.

CLAUDE LA CHARITÉ is a Professor of French literature of the ancien régime at the

University of Québec at Rimouski. His research focuses on the rhetoric and poetics of
genres, especially in Rabelais, and on women writers of the Renaissance, particularly
Marie de Romieu. He is affiliated with the Sixteenth-Century Workshop directed by
Mireille Huchon and is the author of La rhétorique épistolaire de Rabelais (2003).

DAVID LAGUARDIA is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

at Dartmouth College. His first book, The Iconography of Power, was a study of
sixteenth-century French nouvelle collections. He has published articles on Rabelais, Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Blaise de Monluc, and other writers of the Renaissance. Among other
projects, he is currently coediting a volume of essays on the study of material culture in
early-modern France.

GERARD LAVATORI received his Ph.D. in French literature from Brown University.
His doctoral dissertation, “Language and Money in Rabelais,” was published in 1996.
Since 1991, he has been teaching French language, literature, and civilization at the
University of La Verne, near Los Angeles.

JOHN LEWIS is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast.
He is the author of numerous articles on the French Renaissance, particularly on Rabelais.
His last book was Adrien Turnèbe, A Humanist Observed (1998), and he is currently
completing a study of French reactions to the theories and trial of Galileo, due to be
published in 2004.

KATHLEEN PERRY LONG is an Associate Professor of French at Cornell University.

She has published the book, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the
Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard, as well as articles on the Huguenot poet Théodore
Agrippa d’Aubigné and on hermaphrodites. She is currently revising a book-length study
on hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe.

DEBORAH NICHOLS LOSSE, the elected disciplinary representative for French in the
Renaissance Society of America, completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in French at the Uni-
versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently chair of the Department of
Languages and Literatures and professor of French at Arizona State University. Her
publications include Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy and Sampling the
Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs.
290 About the Contributors

LOUISA MACKENZIE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian

Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research is focused principally on
the French sixteenth century, including notions and representations of nature and land-
scape, travel writing, and images of Julius Caesar. She has articles published or forth-
coming on Ronsard, Jean Parmentier, Montaigne, and Don DeLillo, and is working on
a book project on French Renaissance poetic landscapes.

ERIC MACPHAIL is an Associate Professor of French at Indiana University, where he

has taught for fifteen years. His research focuses on the intersection of literary form and
historical consciousness in the European Renaissance.

FRED W. MARSHALL, an Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, is Professor

Emeritus at Waikato University (NZ), where he served as the Chair of French from 1970
until his retirement in 1994. He has published on Jean Bodel, Le jeu de St. Nicolas,
Maurice Scève, and Rabelais.

DOUGLAS MCFARLAND received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berke-
ley, and is the Manning M. Pattillo Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair of the De-
partment of English and Comparative Literature at Oglethorpe University, where he
teaches Renaissance literature, Latin, and Attic Greek. He has published articles on Spen-
ser, Rabelais, and Montaigne and is currently working on a metrical analysis of the verse
of Caliban in The Tempest.

JACQUES E. MERCERON is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University, Bloo-

mington. He is the author of Le message et sa fiction. La communication par messagers
dans la littérature française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1998) and Dictionnaire des saints
imaginaires et facétieux du Moyen Age à nos jours (2002). He specializes in medieval
French studies and Comparative Folklore and Mythology.

JENNIFER MONAHAN is an independent scholar living in Berkeley, California, where

she obtained her Ph.D. Her current work focuses on sixteenth-century reception of the
Roman de la rose and its connection to Renaissance shifts in hermeneutic practice. Pre-
vious publications include articles on préciosité and on Christine de Pizan.

IAN R. MORRISON is a lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne

(UK). His publications include Rabelais: “Tiers Livre,” “Quart Livre,” “Ve Livre”
(1994).

JOHN PARKIN is Professor of French Literary Studies at the University of Bristol where
he has taught since 1972. He has published on a variety of sixteenth-century authors
including Pasquier, Bodin, Montaigne and Machiavelli, but his fullest contributions are
on Rabelais, including, most recently, Interpretations of Rabelais (2002).

JEFF PERSELS is Associate Professor of French at the University of South Carolina.

He is the author of articles on Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and French Reformation
polemic. His most recent project and volume of essays, co-edited with Russell Ganim,
is Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology.
 About the Contributors 291

ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT, who is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English at

Barnard College, is the author of Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998)
and a co-editor of Spenser Studies.

SHEILA J. RABIN is Chair of the History Department at St. Peter’s College, where she
teaches medieval and Renaissance subjects. She writes on science and the occult in the
Renaissance.

CATHARINE RANDALL is Professor of French at Fordham University and former

Chair of the Department. She has published five books and over fifty articles on Calvinism,
literature, and related topics including architecture. Her most recent book, Building Codes:
The Calvinist Aesthetic of Early Modern Europe, was published in 1999. She is currently
completing manuscripts on Marguerite de Navarre and the Camisard genocide.

LESA RANDALL is an independent scholar living in Tucson, Arizona. In 1999 she

completed her dissertation on Renaissance literary representations of syphilis, with a
chapter devoted to Rabelais.

STEPHEN RAWLES retired from Glasgow University Library in 2001. He is the coau-
thor, with M. A. Screech, of A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before
1626 (1987) and, with Alison Adams and Alison Saunders, of A Bibliography of French
Emblem Books (1999–2002). He is currently working on French printers’ decorated in-
itials of the sixteenth century, and on the 1691 shelf catalogue of Glasgow University
Library.

TODD REESER is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Utah. His research
focuses on gender and sexuality in the sixteenth century, and he has published on Mon-
taigne, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Bourdieu, French cultural studies, and Renais-
sance travel narratives. He is completing a book on Aristotelian masculinity in the Ren-
aissance.

LEVILSON C. REIS is an Assistant Professor of foreign languages at Otterbein College,

Westerville, Ohio. He teaches French language and literature and pursues research inter-
ests in medieval, Renaissance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature.

BERND RENNER is currently an Assistant Professor of Modern languages at Brooklyn

College (CUNY). He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2000. His dissertation
examined different forms of satirical expression in Clément Marot and François Rabelais.
Previous publications include articles on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Béroalde de Verville.

FRANÇOIS RIGOLOT, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature, chairs

the Program in Renaissance Studies at Princeton University. His major books include
Les langages de Rabelais (1972); Les métamorphoses de Montaigne (1988); L’erreur de
la Renaissance (2002); and Poésie et Renaissance (2003). He is also the editor of Louise
Labé’s complete works and Montaigne’s Journal de voyage. He was knighted into the
Ordre National du Mérite in 2002.

MARIAN ROTHSTEIN holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and

teaches French at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She is the author of Reading
292 About the Contributors

in the Renaissance: Amadis de Gaule and the Lessons of Memory (1999). Her current
projects focus on the Androgyne in the Renaissance and cultural changes in the decade
around 1540.

JEROME SCHWARTZ is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Pittsburgh.

PETER SHARRATT An honarary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh, he has pub-

lished extensively on Renaissance literature and thought in Latin and French and also on
art. He was co-author with France Sharratt of Écosse romane (1985), and co-editor, with
Keith Aspley and Elizabeth Cowling, of From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Lit-
erature in France 1880–1950 (2000). He is currently working on a book on Salomon.

SANDRA SIDER’s 1978 dissertation was entitled “Emblematic Imagery in Rabelais.”

She has published on Rabelais and numerous other Renaissance topics. An Assistant
Vice President in Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s, she currently is studying art
history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

PAUL J. SMITH is Professor of French literature at the University of Leiden (Nether-

lands). He is the author of Voyage et écriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais
(1987), co-author of Francis Ponge: lectures et méthodes (forthcoming), and Fabuleux
La Fontaine (1996).

KAREN SORSBY is Associate Professor of French at California State University, Chico.

She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of California, Davis, and is the
author of Representations of the Body in French Renaissance Poetry (1999). She cur-
rently is working on a book on representations of the body in film and literature of the
French penal colonies.

AGNIESZKA STECZOWICZ is a doctoral student at Lincoln College, University of

Oxford, having previously studied in Paris and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Fon-
tenay). She is writing a thesis on paradox in the Renaissance disciplines of medicine,
theology, law, and philosophy. Her academic interests are centered on medieval and
Renaissance literature and intellectual history.

WALTER STEPHENS is the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at the

Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient
History, and Nationalism (1989); and Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of
Belief (2002).

EMILY E. THOMPSON is an Associate Professor of French at Webster University (Saint

Louis). She has published articles on Bonaventure Des Périers and is currently working
on a book on alternate discourses in the French nouvelle tradition.

ANDREA WALKDEN is a graduate student in Renaissance Studies and English at Yale

University.

FLORENCE M. WEINBERG, Professor Emerita at Trinity University in San Antonio,

is the author of The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity (1972), Gar-
gantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart’s View of Rabelais (1986), and Rabelais et les
leçons du rire: paraboles évangéliques et néoplatoniciennes (2000). Her works of fiction
 About the Contributors 293

include the seventeenth-century mysteries Sonora Wind, Ill Wind (2002) and I’ll Come
to Thee by Moonlight (2002), as well as an historical novel on Louise Labé.

ELIZABETH CHESNEY ZEGURA is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the

University of Arizona and has published on Rabelais, Ariosto, and Garnier. She is cur-
rently exploring issues of class, politics, and gender in Marguerite de Navarre’s Hepta-
méron.