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FRANÇOIS RABELAIS, born in the 1480s, is very much a Renaissance man. As a Franciscan turned Benedictine he studied Law; he graduated as a doctor at Montpellier in 1530. Living irregularly, he published in 1532 the first of his comic ‘Chronicles’, Pantagruel;
By early 1535 he had published Gargantua,
In January 1535 Rabelais fled from his post as physician in Lyons.
During his various stays in Italy Rabelais reads Celio Calcagnini, the mythographer.
August: Etienne Dolet is burnt in the Place Maubert.
1562 The Isle Sonante is published. 1564 Publication of the Fifth Book. The Council of Trent concludes and publishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which places Rabelais at the head of the ‘heretics of the first class’.
From the outset medical men liked Rabelais. The earliest extant allusion to Pantagruel in print is found in a lecture delivered before the medical faculty at Nantes on 7 August 1534. The lecturer, an Italian physician, contrasts the modest contents of a proper enema with the enormous compound prescribed by a rival, more worthy, he thinks, of the giants in those recent books of Pantagruel enjoying such a success.
Law was his first love. He counted amongst his earliest friends in Touraine André Tiraqueau, a great legal scholar.
For humanists everywhere elegant Latin stretched from before Cicero and Seneca right up to Jerome in the fourth century (and even, exceptionally, to Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth). As for the study of Greek, it included almost everything written in that fluent tongue: Plato of course; Aristotle too, but also Aristophanes and Lucian amongst the laughers, the medical authorities Hippocrates and Galen, Plutarch the moralist, the New Testament and all the Greek theologians (including many disliked by Rome). Several humanists aspired to learn Hebrew, often very successfully. (Rabelais knew at
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Rabelais was hounded by his Franciscan superiors who disapproved of his studying Greek. (Greek encouraged dangerous thoughts.)
He shared that ordeal with his learned fri...
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In his Third Book Rabelais recalls how Pierre Amy had consulted Homeric and Virgilian ‘lots’ (which involved opening pages of Homer and Virgil and seeking guidance from selected lines of verse). He was led to renounce his vows and flee. Rabelais, however, had behaved more prudently: great fol...
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He retained mixed memories of his short Benedictine phase. In many ways he remained a Franciscan rather than a monk. (Franciscans are mendicants not monks.) Nevertheless his Frère Jean, one of the greatest comic characters of all time, is a Benedictine, often simply called ‘The Monk’.
From 1536 he was ‘Dr’ Rabelais or ‘Father’ Rabelais, widely known and respected for his knowledge of medicine and law.
Over his Fourth Book of 1552 Rabelais was positively courted by Cardinal Odet de Châtillon. That cardinal was a member of a powerful trio, nephews of the great statesman Anne de Montmorency, the Constable of France.
In 1546 Rabelais was graciously permitted to dedicate his Third Book to Marguerite d’Angoulême, the Queen of Navarre, the liberal, mystical, platonizing, evangelical sister of François I. (An author in her own right, she was a protector of evangelicals, even of some disapproved of by her royal brother.)
Erasmus showed that worthwhile things could be achieved outside the cloister. He showed how Christianity could be further enriched by the writings of the ancients. He knew how to laugh and he held medicine in high esteem. Rabelais became the kind of humanist doctor who risked his life for his patients during the plague: the kind of physician whom Erasmus could admire.
One of the works he most often evokes is Maître Pathelin, a French farce laughing at lawyers which was performed at Court by Songe-creux, a great comic actor.
A major influence on him was Lucian, the late Greek mocker whom Erasmus too had taken as a model. Works of that grinning Greek (the joy of many a subtle writer) were being translated into Latin by well-known scholars and so made widely accessible. Erasmus translated some. So did Thomas More. So did the wise and tolerant Melanchthon, the Lutheran Preceptor of Germany. And so did Rabelais, while still a Franciscan. (His translation has been lost.)
Such an author cannot be ignored, for he often stirs up great controversies. Rabelais was troublesome from the start. Each book of his at once provoked a storm for, besides his many admirers, he had powerful enemies who would willingly have burnt his books (and him as well).
When Gargantua was being written, Paris was in turmoil over heresy, with religious riots firmly suppressed. Rabelais had to flee from Lyons to Italy in January 1535. After the Third Book (1546) he fled to Metz, then a free German city. Censors tried to suppress his Fourth Book of 1552. They failed, but rumour suggested (wrongly, it seems) that he was in serious trouble. In 1562, the Council of Trent put him on their Index of Forbidden Books as a ‘heretic of the first class’.
He trod on a great many toes, but his enemies had to work within legal constraints. No record of any legally enforceable condemnation of Pantagruel survives from the time of its first success. But in 1533 the Sorbonne had taken measures against The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, a committed, evangelical poem by Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister. With the help of his troops the king soon put a stop to that!
Gargantua is presented in its Prologue as a book which resembles Socrates. Both are sileni, a term drawn from Silenus, the jester of the gods, the gross, ugly old devotee of Bacchus. Sileni are presented as little graven images with a god to be found hidden inside them when they are opened up, or as pharmacists’ boxes decorated on the outside with grotesques or, say, an ugly old flute-player. But open them up and look within and you find something precious, something divine. So too for Socrates and for Gargantua.
Rabelais accepted the maxim ‘Contraries juxtaposed to contraries shine forth more clearly’. The education of the giant is such a juxtaposition. The young giant delights in suave ways of wiping his bottom: the reformed giant goes modestly to the jakes with his tutor, cleansing body and soul together.
Rabelais felt obliged (in January 1535) to abandon his post as physician in the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons and to flee from France. Laughter in Gargantua is not aroused by a man living an uneventful and comfortable existence.
Over ten years were to pass before Rabelais was persuaded to publish his Third Book (1546). It is dedicated to the enraptured ‘spirit’ (or ‘mind’) of Queen Marguerite de Navarre, who was a deeply religious woman, both mystical and evangelical. (Rabelais treats her as a contemplative whose mind, caught away to Heaven in rapture, has to be tempted back to earth in order to witness the joyous deeds of his new book.)
Third Book is his masterpiece of philosophical comedy.
Pantagruel is now a giant in wisdom, Panurge, an ageing fool, progressively driven deeper into melancholy madness by his yearning to take a wife and his terror of being cuckolded, beaten and robbed if he does so.
It is a feast of rhetoric and dialectic, twin subjects of study in Renaissance schools and colleges.
The framework of the book owes much to legal doctrines about how to deal with ‘perplex cases’ – legal cases where the law reaches an impasse. The advice of Roman Law is to follow two intertwining courses: to consult acknowledged experts and harmonize their opinions; and then, when (in the technical legal phrase) ‘there is no other way’, to seek counsel from dice, divination and lots.
The Fourth Book of 1552 is a very different matter. The Rabelais of the full Fourth Book has greatly profited from his reading, some of it gleaned in Italy and in German lands. In Italy, with the Seigneur de Langey, he had read the works of Celio Calcagnini, who was long judged the best mythographer of the Renaissance.
Another book to influence him was Plato’s Cratylus. Before he had studied the Cratylus Rabelais worked within the standard linguistic ideas of Aristotle: to speak is natural, but no language is natural. Except for onomatopoeias, words are sounds on to which meanings have been arbitrarily imposed. For Plato in the Cratylus words are more complex. Onomatopoeias, for Plato as for Aristotle, convey their sense in their sound, but the ‘true’ meaning of some words is to be sought in their etymologies. (Etymology involved seeking out the etymon, the word’s true meaning.) In the roots of at least some
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Both birth and death are veiled with awe: stripped of their veils and skilfully trivialized, they too can be turned into subjects of laughter. Rabelais gives his readers clear pointers. One may be simple and intuitive; the next may be a saying from, say, Saint Paul entwined with words from Plato.
Rabelais deliberately employs many rare words, words which would have baffled most of his contemporaries. That is a conscious stylistic device. His vocabulary is vast, drawing upon dialects and loan-words as well as on French at its richest. Italian, Dutch, German and even English and Scottish words may jostle with Greek, Latin or Hebrew terms. To translate him always by common-or-garden English terms would be to traduce him. Some of his words should fox readers and others challenge them. Their very rarity is their appeal. Their general meanings (if we need to know them) are normally
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Rabelais uses more different words than any other French author.
There were indeed three Thursdays when the moon wandered more than ten yards from her course because of the irregular bissextile days.
had not been more scorched then than in the days of Elijah. Not one tree in the land bore leaf or bloom; the plants were not green, the rivers had withered and the wells had run dry; the fish – abandoned, poor things, by their natural element – roamed squealing horribly over the land; birds tumbled out of the air for lack of dew; wolves, foxes, stags, boars, deer, hares, rabbits, weasels, ferrets, badgers and other creatures were found scattered dead across the fields with their mouths gaping wide.
The Philosopher, on moving the question of why the sea is salt, relates that, when Phoebus handed over the reins of his light-shedding chariot to Phaeton his son, he, unskilled in the art and not knowing how to follow the ecliptic between the two tropics of the sun’s sphere, wandered from his path and drew so close to the Earth that he desiccated all the subjacent lands, scorching that large segment of the heavens which philosophers call the Milky Way and the foolosophers Saint James’s Road [whereas the most tufted poets say that it is where Juno let her milk dribble down as she was giving
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And because Pantagruel was born that very day, his father imposed that name on him (for panta in Greek means the same as ‘all’ and gruel in Hagarene means the same as ‘thirst’), wishing to signify that at the hour of his nativity all the world was athirst, and foreseeing in a spirit of prophecy that he would one day be Ruler of the Thirsty-ones.
out comes Pantagruel, all over hair like a bear. In a spirit of prophecy one of the sage-women declared: ‘Born hairy was he! Wondrous deeds will he do! If he goes on to live, then old shall he grow.’
Gargantua, fearing that Pantagruel might hurt himself, had ingenious flying buttresses made for his cradle as well as four huge iron chains to hold him in. (You now have one of those chains at La Rochelle, where they draw it up at night between the two great towers in the haven.) Another is at Lyons; another is at Angers, whilst the fourth was borne away by devils in order to hold down Lucifer, who was furiously breaking out into madness because of an extraordinarily infuriating belly-ache brought on from having eaten for breakfast a fricassee of law-serjeant’s soul.
Some see in this chapter a comic transposition of Rabelais’ own travels in the course of his studies. He certainly knew at first hand some of the places mentioned here, including Fontenay-le-Comte and Maillezais. There are also allusions to friends of his, including the abbé Ardillon and André Tiraqueau, the great legal scholar. It was at Montpellier that Rabelais became a ‘doctor’ – as Bachelors of Medicine were already called – and, in the course of time, a full Doctor of Medicine.
So he and some of his companions left Poitiers, passed through Ligugé, [calling on the noble abbé Ardillon,] then through Lusignan, Sansay, Celles, Saint Liguaire, Colonges and Fontenay-le-Comte, [where they greeted the learned Tiraqueau,] and from thence came to Maillezais, where Pantagruel visited the tomb of Geoffrey Long-Tooth,
he then went on to Toulouse, where he learnt how to dance very well and to play with the two-handed sword as is the custom amongst students at that university. But he did not stay there long once he saw how they burnt their regents alive like red herrings. ‘God forbid,’ he said, ‘that I should die like that: I’m thirsty enough by nature without being hotted up further.’
Merlin Coccaius: On the Homeland of the Devils.
Generation and corruption will cease at the end of Time when ‘Jesus Christ shall have delivered up his peaceful Kingdom to God, even the Father’ (I Corinthians 15:34).
The whole chapter savours of the renewed enthusiasm for Ancient learning. From the earlier times theologians such as Tertullian called God the ‘Plasmator’, the ‘Moulder’, the ‘Fashioner’: like a potter he made Man of clay.
our seed, what was lost to the parents remains in their children and what perished in the children remains in the grandchildren, successively, until the hour of the Last Judgement, when Jesus Christ shall have delivered up his peaceful Kingdom to God the Father,19 free from all domination and stain of sin; then shall cease all generation and corruption, and the elements will be without their constant transformations, seeing that yearned-for peace shall be consummated [and perfected] and all things brought to their End and period.
And even though Grandgousier, my late father of grateful memory, devoted all his zeal towards having me progress towards every perfection and polite learning, and even though my toil and study did correspond very closely to his desire – indeed surpassed them – nevertheless, as you can well understand, those times were neither so opportune nor convenient for learning as they now are, and I never had an abundance of such tutors as you have. The times were still dark, redolent of the disaster and calamity of the Goths, who had brought all sound learning to destruction;
The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold that it was not as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now.
