Thought about action: ergon in Gargantua

Abstract

Rabelais’s fictional chronicles communicate thought about action, including about the relationship of action to social status. They explore and test the view, which was widespread in the period, that the actions you undertake in life should be determined by your social status. The notion that certain actions properly characterise different social groups because those groups have distinct functions in society is widely communicated by the term ergon in key ancient Greek texts which Rabelais knew in the original. So ergon provides a way into the wider question of Rabelais’s representation of, and relationship to, social hierarchy. That question, explored here in relation to a key sixteenth-century work, was opened up in relation to key seventeenth-century works by Michael Moriarty’s pioneering Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (1988).