Rabelais and the reception of the ‘art’ of Ramón Lull in early sixteenth-century France

Abstract

In the celebrated letter from father to son in Pantagruel (1531), Rabelais urges the student giant to ignore the claims of judicial astrology and the Art of Ramón Lull as an ‘abuse and vanity’. Although Rabelais criticises judicial astrology in many places in his Chronicles, the condemnation of Lull is exceptional, as is the specific association of Lull with judicial astrology. For many Renaissance writers, Lull's Art – expressed in greatest detail in both manuscript and printed versions of his Ars Magna– was nothing more than an over-complicated calculating device, and equated it to a debased form of cabbala. Lull thought of himself as a rational theologian whose method explained the very structure of the universe and the mind of God. His Art enjoyed its own Renaissance through the editions of Lefevre d'Etaples, Charles de Bovelles, Bernard de Lavinheta and Josse Bade. Rabelais's condemnation may be explained by the publication of the influential commentaries on the Art by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, a noted Renaissance magus and the model for the comically exaggerated Her Trippa in Rabelais's Tiers Livre of 1546.