Rabelais's Work Research Articles

La réception de La grant nef des folz du monde à travers les annotations de l’exemplaire de la bibliothèque de Vienne

This paper aims to study the reception of La grant nef des folz du monde beyond the works of Rabelais, of Bouchet, and the actual loans Jean Drouyn took to complete his own Nef des folles. The Wien and Toulouse exemplars allow us to complete the inquiry through the annotations they contain. The work was noticed for its didacticism and is the subject of a practice of imitation, which reaps in sayings and exempla, showing that a humanist reading of vernacular literature is growing in importance in this century.

Intertextual Echoes: Emblems, Rabelais, and Heptaméron 13

This article argues that in novella thirteen of the Heptameron , Marguerite de Navarre positions her text against misogynistic and iconographical representations of women found in works by Guillaume de La Perriere, Gilles Corrozet, and Rabelais. The article begins with a brief overview of the representations of women found in emblems of the period and in Rabelais's work. Next, the article analyzes novella thirteen from the perspective of emblematics. This analysis reveals how Navarre deploys emblematic structures and a technique of inversion in her tale in order to position her work against contemporary misogynistic and stereotypical representations of women.

Newer archaeologies of the soul: avatars of religious consciousness in modern European fiction

The juxtaposition of cultural eras and belief systems reached a new encyclopedic scale in poetic narratives and anthropological treatises from the Renaissance onward as we see in the works of Rabelais and Kircher. In the romantic age, Goethe’s completed Faust established a new epochal standard for probing the story of human spiritual development over millennia. Heirs to this rich tradition, authors such as Mann and Joyce felt liberated to re-examine mythological patterns and varieties of religious consciousness as a crucial heritage against the backdrop of modern strains of negation and deconstruction of belief systems. Combining self-critical irony with brilliant depictions of literary and psycho-historical avatars, their novels finally suggest a spiritual super-reality that emerges from the colossal repertory of evolutionary evidence.

La Renaissance des mots: de Jean Lemaire de Belges a Agrippa d'Aubigne

Floyd Gray arrives at this project uniquely well equipped to provide for the reader an analytical account of the inexorable rise of the ‘word’ (which for him is dominated in this period by the flourishing of the vernacular language) across the sixteenth century. As both a literary scholar and an authority on print culture, he is able to engage with the historical, theoretical, material, linguistic, and literary aspects of vernacular words and their usage to illuminate central and large-scale questions pertaining to ‘literariness’. What is literature? How and when did it come into being? What are the linguistic markers that signal its emergence at the beginning of the modern era? Gray first examines the historical conditions that allowed the vernacular language to flourish, tracing the development of a new self-consciousness in writing. This part of the work has been specially written to introduce much of the historical framework necessary for understanding the literary studies that follow. The rest of the volume allows Gray to revisit articles and book contributions that have previously appeared elsewhere over the course of the last thirty-five years. These have been extensively rewritten and are grouped together under four main headings. The first section explores multiple aspects of the status of words in the works of Rabelais: a vast and rich laboratory of language. The second examines the self in Du Bellay (expressed anonymously only through synonyms) and Ronsard (through the commentaries of Marc-Antoine de Muret and Rémy Belleau) as literary predecessors to the focus of the third section, the works of Montaigne. Here Montaigne the reader, his treatment of animals, his literary monument to the memory of La Boétie, love, and La Bruyère's portrait of Montaigne provide points of entry into the author's all-encompassing fascination with words. Finally, Gray hints at the potential circularity of the language of sixteenth-century representations of the female body in a series of chapters on this theme in Jean Lemaire de Belges, Jeanne Flore, and Agrippa d'Aubigné. There is much here to engage the reader. The work is admirable in its ambition, and the literary analysis of the later part of the volume is undoubtedly enriched by the addition of the historical perspective to the analytical horizon. Gray succeeds in making accessible to the reader an area that is complex because it is fundamental to the composition and reception of texts and our understanding of them. The diversity of the complementary approaches included here means that while much is illuminated, nothing is obscured, as would be the risk with a volume that sought to map out this difficult terrain in terms of a smaller number of global and coherent narratives. Some questions, however, particularly those concerning the material presentation of texts, would have benefited from more sustained comparison across the chronological period in order for the reader to understand more fully the nature and extent of the changes that took place.

Putting the ‘Haute’ Back into the ‘Haute Dame de Paris’: The Politics and Performance of Rabelais’s Radical Farce

In 1911 Gustave Cohen published an important article in Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes entitled et le theatre. (2) Cohen's article centered on late medieval theater and Rabelais; specifically he focused on the theater of farce and its role in Rabelais's work. Almost a century later, another medievalist from the University of Amsterdam, Jelle Koopmans, commented that Cohen's article est reste pendant longtemps, malgre sa date de publication (1911) [...], le dernier mot sur la (3) while underscoring the need for much more work on this important influence on Rabelais's work. Rabelais's tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel contain a surprisingly large number of references to farces, and many episodes within the Chroniques are structured with a farce-like framework. Rabelais was extremely familiar with the theater of farce, and this intimacy affected his work in important ways. Indeed, the theater of farce is a crucial subtext in understanding Rabelais's literary project. Rabelais's use of dramatic farce offers a fascinating dynamic of cultural transferal. His books were written towards the end of a watershed era of this theatrical genre in France, from approximately 1450 to 1550. There remain over 150 extant French farces dating from this period, the best known being the Farce de Maitre Pathelin. Rabelais alludes to Pathelin some two dozen times in his work, and, as Koopmans has noted, cite soit directement soit indirectement, textuellement et librement, des centaines de passages [des farces], voire plus, parfois directement, parfois indirectement. (4) It is not a coincidence that, in one of only two instances of authorial self-reference within the work, the text refers to a farce in which Rabelais took part while a medical student at Montpellier (Tiers livre ch. 34). (5) Records confirm the autobiographical reality behind this, as Rabelais, like so many students in France, participated in a theatrical group that enacted productions of farce, such as the specific play referred to in the chapter, Celui qui espousa une femme mute. (6) These references point to an underlying farcical, theatrical spirit that informs Rabelais's work. Moreover, farce becomes a central structuring mechanism for many of the narrative encounters in Gargantua and the Pantagrueline chronicles. (7) An overview of the way farce functions, both in its original dramatic format and, more importantly, in Rabelais's books, illustrates the radicalization of this genre. Beyond the obvious example of generic transferal, as theater is transcribed into prose, the transformation of farce takes place on two primary levels in Rabelais. First, the subject matter is altered in significant ways. The setting of farce is primarily a domestic one, with disputes between spouses and additional characters such as imbecilic servants and lascivious monks. This private, anonymous setting is replaced by the much more public, ideologically-charged settings of Rabelais's farce-like scenes. Second, the ethos of farce is inherently conservative; the humiliating reversals that characterize the genre are not posited to call social norms into question, but rather to reinstate them. (8) Rabelais turns these comedic reversals on their head, and whereas in farce the victim is always a transgressor of the status quo, Rabelais takes aim at societal institutions in the areas of education, law, and theology, effecting humiliating volte-faces on characters that reflect these power structures. (9) There is not a better example of an archetypical trompeur than Pantagruel's companion Panurge. From the moment he arrives in chapter nine of Pantagruel, he is immediately associated with Pathelin, the supreme trickster of the genre. His elaborate glossalalia constitutes an updated, humanist-inspired version of Pathelin's famous delirium scene with the merchant. Panurge then goes on to best the Englishman Thaumaste in a farcical performance before turning his attention to the haute dame de Paris. …

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Androgyne, Agape and the Abbey of Theleme

To many a modern nose, Rabelais's work overall has an order of misogyny. There are multiple sources of this, starting perhaps with Rabelais's early firneship with Tiraqueau whose legal scholarship insists on woman's inferiority to man. The same strain is reflected in the Tiers Livre, where Rabelais creates Doctor Rondibilis who can wonder without detectible irony if women should be classified as people or animals. [1] The impression is deepened by the paucity of female characters. Pantagruel briefly has a lady-love who, however, figures in the novel only when his interest in her is past. The Dame de Paris appears briefly first as a sex-object for Panurge and then for the dogs of Paris. [2] Badebec conveniently dies giving birth to Pantagruel; presumably to avoid outright repetition, Gargamelle, Gargantua's mother, lives on, ignored, until the start of Chapter 35, where she is dismissed by the narrator when Gargantua returns from war: Car Supplementum Supplementi Chronicorum dict que Gargamelle y mourut dejoy e. Je n'en say rien de ma part, et peu me soucye ny d'elle ny d'aultre femme qui soyt. [For the Supplement to the Supplement of the Chronicles says that Gargamelle died of joy at that point. Personally, I know nothing about it, and care little for her or any other woman.] [3] I grant that most of this is not, strictly speaking, misogyny, since with the exception of Rondibilis, these examples say nothing negative about women. [4] They do suggest an ambiant attitude epitomized by the narrator's response to Gargamelle's passing: bien peu me soucye ny d'elle ny d'aultre femme qui soyt. Woman, whether as mother, potential wife, or whore, is seen as body. Issues of this sort raised in modern feminist criticism, interesting in their own right, are beyond the scope of the present discussion. While the evidence does not support the accusations of misogyny, nevertheless, it seems fair to say that the general temper of Rabelais's fictional universe understands real people to be male. Theleme, where women are deliberately included and occasionally privileged, may be the exception that proves the rule. Despite the considerable scholarly attention that has been devoted to the Theleme episode, the cause of this exception to Rabelais's usually jaundiced attitude toward women has not to my knowledge been questioned; the presence of women is taken merely as one of the elements marking Theleme as an anti-abbey. [5] Women are included alongside men as an inversion of the rule of abbeys in the real world, which accepted gender/sexual segregation as a necessary principle of their organization. That would account for the inclusion of women, but it does not explain the fact that the rules of the Abbey systematically treat them as men's equals. The Abbey is a satirical anti-abbey, and at the moment of Gargantua's composition, such satire is not to be taken lightly. Yet satire is an appropriate but insufficient explanation for Theleme. As so often in Rabelais's polyvalent creation, the comic is also se rious. The playful inversion of the ways of the world is immediately apparent and there is much to laugh at in the Theleme chapters. The graver implications may require more reflection and they are the central concern here. Since the Abbey is named in the chapter title, we know its name (and the message that comes with it) before we learn any of its satiric aspects. Theleme, the space in which thelema, the will of God, reigns, is inhabited by a community of Christians living in the spirit of the New Testament, free of the old Law. [6] And this, as I will attempt to demonstrate, is the source and pattern of the depiction of women in this episode. The distinction between sex and gender as it was commonly understood in medieval and Renaissance thought is critical to understanding the status granted women in Gargantua chapters 50-55. At the start of the discussion defining the Abbey, satire and utopia are placed side by side, each nourishing the other. …

THE PHILOSOPHICAL CITY OF RABELAIS AND ST TERESA-- LE CORBUSIER AND EDOUARD TROUIN'S SCHEME FOR ST BAUME

In the years following the Second World Ward, Edouard Trouin and the architect Le Corbusier put enormous effort into a design for a city and underground basilica focussing on the grotto of Mary Magdalene in St Baume in the south of France. The spiritual programme for the project was to be governed by a synthesis of ideas derived from the works of Rabelais and St Teresa, an unlikely combination. What follows is an exploration of their influence on the development of this ambitious scheme.

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (review)

416Philosophy and Literature critics of any persuasion is her sensitivity to the literary text and how it shapes the specific appearance of the archetype. Knapp is particularly adept at showing how certain objects and settings create images or visualizations of exile and indeed of the "inner geography" of the human psyche; striking examples include the labyrinthian prison in The House of the Dead, the anthill in Recollections of Things to Come, and the ruined tramway in That Time. Most convincing, perhaps, are those chapters where Knapp uses linguistic analysis to show how a given word or name can resonate simultaneously on all levels—the individual, the cultural, and the mythical—to wrest the archetype from the recesses of the unconscious and objectify it within the text; memorable instances are found in her brilliant essays on Conrad, Agnon, and Beckett. The reader ofPhilosophy and Literature will be particularly rewarded by Knapp's continuous examining of the very bases of her approach, the allusions to western philosophers from Heraclitus to Hegel, the discussion of time in Garro and Beckett, and the exposition of oriental philosophies in Kawabata and Cheng. Few critics can match either the breadth of Knapp's cultural background, which enables her to seize the most slippery of allusions, or her sensitivity to the human dimensions of the archetypes and works she explores. Any reader will be enriched by the experience of reading Exile and the Writer. The conclusion she derives from the ten fictional works may well be applied to her illuminating critical study of them: "By evaluating the meanings of their reactions to the creative work, readers in certain cases also clarify their own chaotic feelings, thoughts, and impulses. When critical faculties are called into play during and following the completion of a novel, short story, or play, a better understanding of the problems and pleasures of others may emerge" (p. 236). University of Wisconsin-MadisonWilliam J. Berg The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing, by Tom Conley; xi & 226 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, $54.95. Conley's dense but readable study analyzes the importance of typographical shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and the history of the printed word. It begins with a theoretical chapter that explains how printed characters can convey sense and confusion at the same time, can either support or betray what they appear to articulate, and can thereby be aligned with modern notions of the unconscious which Renaissance artists do not place in the depths of the psyche but rather on the surface of things. Reviews417 The first two chapters treat Marot and Rabelais. In "A Secret Space: Marot's Rondeaux," the author traces the inner itinerary of the poet, underscoring verbal and plastic representations as well as the dialogical nature of the verse. Much of this has to do with the nature of the rondeau itself and the poet's signature within his writing. Conley also charts "the graphics of [the poet's] psychomachia" (p. 31) and, through the visual dimension ofhis poetry, Marot's mute subversion of the orthodoxy he appears to defend at a time when poets could have paid for their license with death. "The Rabelaisian Hieroglyph" portrays the deep links between the growth of typography and Rabelais's work where we find hermetic dimensions, a Utopian dream of "living writing" and, in revisions made after the heresy trials of 1534, the politics of the hieroglyphic style of Gargantua's preface. With Ronsard we move from the rondeau to the sonnet and from the margins of French political life to its center where this prince of poets appears to underwrite the king at the same time that he transforms the status of poetry. Conley devotes two chapters to Ronsard, depicting his printed sonnets as both discourse and picture and showing how they share the visual innovations of the earlier marginal writings of Marot and Rabelais. Once again, Conley reveals an unconscious rhetoric whose graphic and textual nature allows meaning to emerge in ways that speech cannot control. Verbal expression metamorphoses into pictural movement that often transgresses the laws of the poet's own constitution. Each sonnet becomes an allegory of its own production...

Father figures: genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais (review)

146 Reviews I am not sure that Hint is entirely convincing in this her final portrayal of Columbus. Faced with an historical character as diverse, devious and distant as the Great Admiral, some historical reticence is probably called for. But this is a fine account by one of the most subtle and knowledgeable scholars of medieval intellectual culture, of the cultural world of the last medieval man. Hilary M . Carey Department of History University of Newcastle Freccero, Carla, Father figures: genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xvi, 213; R.R.P. US$27.95 plus 1 0 % overseas. Given Rabelais's interest in all things medical, there is perhaps some justification for employing psychoanalytic tools in a contemporary evaluation of his work. In Father figures, the spotlight is turned, not on Rabelais himself, but on the text, since Carla Freccero holds firmly to the view that the real Rabelais remains forever behind, or before, the books he authored. And, since these books, by their very textuality, refuse to privilege any one ideological or methodological approach, tbe critic is free to pick and choose on the basis of 'a question of interests', or of what Freccero calls 'personal resonance' (pp. x, xi). She chooses therefore to approach Rabelais's work through the study of genealogy, defined not in conventional but in psychoanalytic terms. The theme of filiation is explored on three levels: the relationship between father (Gargantua) and son OPantagruel), between the book (Pantagruel) and its 'sequel' (Gargantud), and between the author and thetexthe has fathered (specifically, the Tiers livre and its progeny). By a wonderful irony of history Pantagruel, the book of the son, appeared in 1532, thus predating Gargantua, the book of the father, by two years. Freccero's discussion of Pantagruel insists on the work's debt to the parent text, the Chronicques gargantuines, but also on its ambition to usurp and overthrow the authority of the parent culture. Since, however, such an ambition generates, in Freccero's Freudian parlance, a 'burden of guilt', genealogical themes in the book undergo a compulsive repetition: they are 'thematically... overdetermined' (p. 12). Thematically, Pantagruel's role both as his father's legitimate son and also as his compliant echo is announced by Gargantua's famous letter of Chapter 8. Pantagruel's potential for oedipal rebellion against the paternal law is nevertheless not realized; instead it is transferred to the adventurer Panurge, a substitute hero embodying the will to subversion and defilement which in Pantagruel is merely latent. By contrast and as benefits the book of the father, the genesis of Gargantua is presented as an act or archaeological reconstruction, not as the product of Reviews 147 biological generation. Gargantua thus becomes 'orginary' for Rabelais's entire corpus. Chapters 8 and 9 of the book, in highlighting the disparity between words and sense, involve the notion offiliationinsofar as what is at stake here is the father's ability to impose his meaning on the sign. More importantly, the Th61eme episode on which the book ends appears at first glance as the triumph of the paternal will, the creation of an imperialist Utopia. Yet on closer inspection Freccero finds Th61eme a kind of retrospective origin by which GaigantxxalGargantua compensates for his/its belated 'birth' in the Rabelaisian corpus. Thdleme is, in Denida's phrase, a 'supplement', designed to make good the defect of the whole. But as supplement it calls forth a countervailing supplement the celebrated Enigme, and thus is revealed to be a failure, the impossible telos of the genealogical quest. The remaining books (from the Tiers livre to the apocryphal Cinquieme livre) are surveyed briefly as a type of the romance quest narrative, centring thematically on Panurge's problematic search for a mate and paternity, and structurally on the multiplication of episodes destined never to arrive at a revelation which might constitute a satisfactory closure. Here again, Freccero detects a displacement of filial succession from Pantagruel to Panurge and, as in the case of Thdleme, a failure to impose a 'unified code of meaning', whose secrettiesforever hidden in the 'dive Bouteille' (p. 188). Father figures interprets in often ingenious ways the varied...

Rabelais and Stoic Portrayal

The influence of Stoicism in the works of Rabelais has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars. The importance of Stoicism in Rabelaisian thought has been interpreted by some to have permitted Rabelais to draft a physical theory of the cosmos based on Stoic monism and its doctrine of universal permeation. For others, Stoicism provided the French humanist with the concept of Pantagruelism, Rabelais’ ‘mépris des choses fortuites’, which they see as forming a restatement of the Stoic principle of apathy or indifference toward things external. Finally, one critic holds that Rabelais’ leaning toward Stoicism represents only partial commitment during a period of intense syncretism wherein the writer assimilates and subordinates Stoic ideas to yet another body of thought which is Evangelical by definition: Stoic indifference - Pauline Folly, the Pan- Christ symbol, the duty of man to conform his will to the Will of God, and so forth.

FRANçOIS RABELAIS, VAUDEVILLISTE

ASTRIKING parallel exists between the comments on human nature expounded so forceful y by Rabelais in his Five Books relating the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and those expressed in French vaudevilles of the lfate seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When the amorphous mass of the vaudeville repertory is examined and classified according to the major themes in Rabelais's work, it quickly assumes a meaningful shape. Rabelais's preoccupation with the symbolism of wine lends new significance to the multitude of vaudevilles in the drinking-song category. His philosophy of free will inherent in the founding of the Abbey of Th61Rme is restated by the eighteenth-century vaudevillistes. His contempt for marriage, his fear of cuckoldry, and his satirical, ribald approach to love pervade their songs. With great relish the later writers imitate his fantastic play with word series, phrases, and rhyming sounds. Rabelais's protests against hypocrisy, his criticism of man's weaknesses, his faith in man's finer instincts, his revelry in the pleasures of human companionship, and his delight in life itself are all echoed in the texts of the vaudevilles.

The Earliest English Reference to Rabelais's Work

The Earliest English Reference to Rabelais's Work

The Authorship of the "Isle Sonnante"

THE publication by the Socidt6 des Ptudes Rabelaisiennes of a reprint of the Isle Sonnante, admirably edited by MM. Abel Lefranc and Jacques Boulenger from the unique copy in the possession of a private owner, has enabled students for the first time to make a careful study of the text of this first instalment of the Fifth Book of Pantagruel. It will be recollected that the Isle Sonnante appeared in 1562 (between eight and ten years after Rabelais's death) without either the publisher's name or the place of publication, and that it professed to be the continuation of Pantagruel's voyage written by Rabelais himself. It was followed in 1564 by the publication of the complete Fifth Book, which also professed to be Rabelais's work. Further, there is a manuscript of the whole Book in the Biblioth6que Nationale; it is written in a sixteenth century hand which is certainly not Rabelais's. Previous to the reprint of the Isle Sonnante, it might have been supposed-in fact, I did so suppose-that this MS. represented the oldest form of the text. But M. Boulenger in his excellent introduction to the reprint has made it clear that it really represents a stage intermediate between the Isle Sonnante and the text of 1564.