Born: 1484(?). Education: Possibly studied law, 1500-10, in Bourges, Angers, or Poitiers; became a Franciscan in 1520s; studied medicine, possibly in Paris, then in Montpellier; Bachelor of medicine, 1530; Doctor of medicine, 1537. Family: Had three illegitimate children (two surviving children later formally legitimated). Career: Lectured in medicine, Montpellier, 1531; practiced in southern France; physician at Hotel-Dieu, Lyons, 1532; visited Italy as personal doctor of Bishop, later Cardinal, Jean Du Bellay, 1534, and later visits with Guillaume Du Bellay; Canon at Benedictine Abbey of Saint Maur-tes-Fosses, 1536; given benefices at Meudon and Jambet, 1551 (resigned them, 1553). Died: 9 April(?) 1553.
Publications
Collections
Oeuvres, edited by Abel Lefranc and others. 6 vols., 1912-55.
Works, edited by Albert Jay Nock and Catherine Rose Wilson. 2 vols., 1931.
Oeuvres completes, edited by Pierre Jourda. 2 vols., 1962.
Complete Works, translated by Donald M. Frame. 1992.
Fiction
Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by Thomas Urquhart, 1653, continuation by P.A. Motteux, 1694; also translated by J.M. Cohen, 1955; Burton Raffel, 1990.
Pantagruel. 1532; edited by V.L. Saulnier, 1965.
Gargantua. 1534(?) (now usually printed as first book); edited by R.M. Calder and M.A. Screech, 1970.
Tiers Livre . . . Pantagruel. 1546; edited by M.A. Screech, 1964.
Quart Livre . . . Pantagruel. 1552; edited by Robert Marichal, 1947.
Other
Pantagrueline prognostication. 1533; edited by M.A Screech, 1974.
The Portable Rabelais (selection), edited and translated by Samuel Putnam. 1946.
Editor, [Works], by Hippocrates and Galen. 1532.
Editor, Aphorismorum, by Hippocrates. 1532.
Editor, Typographia antiquae Romae, by J.B. Marlianus. 1534.
Critical Studies:
The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics, and Cosmic Philosophy, 1958, and Rabelais, 1979, and Looking at Rabelais, 1988, all by M.A. Screech; Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction by Dorothy Gabe Coleman, 1971; The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne by B.C. Bowen, 1972; The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity by F.M. Weinberg, 1972; Rabelais and Panurge: A Psychological Approach to Literary Character by Mary E. Ragland, 1976; Rabelais: A Study by Donald M. Frame, 1977; Rabelais, homo logos by Alice Fiola Berry, 1979; Recreation, Reflection and Recreation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 1980, and Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, 1986, both by Raymond C. La Charite; Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy by Deborah N. Losse, 1980; Irenic Apocalypse: Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch and Rabelais by Dennis Costa, 1981; The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto by Elizabeth A. Chesney, 1982; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais by Lucien Febvre, 1982; The Vulgar Rabelais by Carol A. Clark, 1983; Rabelais at Glasgow: Proceedings of the Colloquium Held at the University of Glasgow in December 1983, 1984; Pantagruel in Canada by Marius Barbeau, 1984; Every Man for Himself: Social Order and its Dissolution in Rabelais by Richard M. Berrong, 1985; Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext by Samuel Kinser, 1990; Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion by Jerome Schwartz, 1990; The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel by Edwin M. Duval, 1991; Rabelais Revisited by Elizabeth Chesney Zagora and Marcel Tetel, 1993; Rabelais, Tiers livre, Quart livre, Ve livre by Ian R. Morrison, 1994; Frangois Rabelais: A Reference Guide, 1950-1990 by Bruno Braunrot, 1994; Frangois Rabelais: Critical Assessments, edited by Jean-Claude Carron, 1995; Rabelais by Michael J. Heath, 1996; The Rabelaisian Mythologies by Max Gauna, 1996; Enter Rabelais, Laughing by Barbara C. Bowen, 1998; Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England by Anne Lake Prescott, 1998; The Charm of Catastrophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart livre by Alice Fiola Berry, 2000.
Frangois Rabelais’s reputation has been fashioned largely by people who have never read a word he wrote. ”Rabelaisian” is often used as a synonym for smutty, while many who have never thought to read the book like to pride themselves on their gargantuan appetites. The image goes back a long way: as early as the middle of the 16th century, Ronsard wrote an epitaph to Rabelais in which he asked passers-by to throw sausages and sides of ham, instead of flowers, on the dead author’s grave. But practitioners of learned wit from Swift to Joyce and Robertson Davies have read and admired him, and Laurence Sterne swore by the ”ashes of my dear Rabelais.”
Rabelais is unique. His particular brand of encyclopedic humour has its origins in his theological training, his vast erudition (he was perfectly at home in Latin and Greek and conversant with most of the major classical authors), and in his expertise in the spheres of medicine, law, and popular culture. To say that he is an Evangelical Christian humanist of Neo-Platonic and Stoic inclinations is to provide the prospective reader with a map of Rabelais country; to get the feel of the landscape you have to plunge into the works themselves with as open a mind as you can. The going will never be easy, for the way is strewn with private jokes and a network of allusions which only a reader armed with a fully annotated edition can hope to understand, but the reward for perseverance will be not only a good deal of healthy laughter but admission to a world imagined by a wordsmith and storyteller of genius.
Recent years have seen Rabelais rescued from the writers of wine catalogues and restored to his rightful place as a great creative writer living in an age dominated by ideas. Yet generalizations (however complimentary) about him are rarely helpful, for the four books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (the posthumous fifth book is probably only partly by him) were written at different dates and in very different circumstances, when the world around him and his reaction to it had undergone great changes.
When Rabelais wrote Pantagruel in 1532, he was in his late forties with a couple of quite separate careers already behind him. This first excursion into prose fiction may well have been written for money (he himself suggests as much in his prologue), but it also released a side of his personality which the learned doctor had hitherto kept in check. Using the easily decipherable pseudonym of Alcofrybas Nasier, he lets the genie out of the bottle and indulges in that archetypal lord of misrule Panurge.
Whereas Pantagruel is a chronicle of mischief, its sequel, Gargantua, has a very different tone, even though the structure and subject-matter are similar. The doings of the family of giants become less important than the ideas they embody. Gargantua’s mother eats vast quantities of tripe, the young giant urinates over 274,418 Parisians, and steals the bells of Notre-Dame, but, notwithstanding these episodes, one senses that he is increasingly the vehicle for Rabelais’s ideas. The book divides conveniently into three distinct sections. In the first 24 chapters, devoted to the childhood of Gargantua, he expounds the sort of ideas of education which had been current for some years among ”progressive” educationalists. Rabelais’s debt to Erasmus and Vives is obvious, and he is swimming with the same tide as Sir Thomas Elyot and, in his praise of discreet elegance, Castiglione. With its emphasis on courtly attributes, this part of the book is very, much a ”mirror for princes” and, despite the jokes, quite removed from the spirit of much of Pantagruel. The narrative switches abruptly to the countryside around the author’s native Chinon in which he sets the Picrocholean War between the giants and an irascible neighbour. This ”war” allows Rabelais to air his views (once again strongly influenced by Erasmus) on the moral limits of military might, and the need for Christians to outlaw wars of aggression. Finally, in the third section of the book, Rabelais builds for his conquering heroes an abbey to their liking, an anti-monastery very different from any existing religious institution. This ”Abbey of Thelema” (New Testament Greek for ”will”) is a palatial refuge from an imperfect world where those whose lives are guided by selflessness and a sense of honour learn to live together, in preparation perhaps for carrying their message beyond the abbey’s walls. The famous motto ”Do as you wish” must be seen in context: it is definitely not a recipe for a free-for-all.
This reflective mood continues in the Tiers Livre (Third Book), published in 1546. Panurge, who had not figured in the Gargantua, returns—almost, one feels, by popular demand—to overshadow the giants themselves, but is now portrayed as less a frolicsome hero than a confused and somewhat pathetic figure, an ageing lecher who is unable to make up his mind as to whether or not he should marry. Attracted by marriage for its physical benefits, he is nevertheless haunted by the fear of being made a cuckold. The book provides Rabelais with an excuse for making a contribution to the topical ”querelle des amies”, a variation on the everpopular ”battle of the sexes” theme, and one to which, one would have thought, the ecclesiastical authorities could not have taken exception. But they had their man in their sights, and, like its predecessors, the Third Book was banned. For this reason perhaps Rabelais returns to his old hobbyhorses in the Quart Livre (Fourth Book), the final version of which came out in 1552. It contains a streak of bitter satire which was not much in evidence before, and some of his attacks (on Calvin, for example) are a treat for connoisseurs of invective. Of all Rabelais’s works, the Fourth Book is the most linguistically inventive, and a high proportion of the jokes and anecdotes still come off. The delightfully ambiguous Brother John, who had been so important in Gargantua, is once more playfully to the fore, his muscular Christianity contrasting with Panurge’s pusillanimity. As our heroes sail in search of the oracle of the bottle, each port of call presents them with a different aspect of human life. The model for this technique was Lucian’s Vera Historia (True History), but Rabelais’s vision is his own. It is summed up by that mediocrite, his version of Horace’s aurea mediocritas or golden mean, which came to dominate his thinking in these last years of his life. He speaks out against sectarianism, rails at being caught between the ”hammer and the anvil,” and makes great play with human folly in all its variety. But parts of the Fourth Book lead one to suspect that the author’s spirits were low, and that his advice to his reader to keep a ”certain gaiety of mind full of contempt for the accidents of life” was meant as much for himself. While some episodes are pure fun, others—notably the moving chapter on the death of heroes—are tinged with sadness. Taken as a whole, though, Rabelais’s work stands out as one of the great comic masterpieces of world literature. Rabelais is indeed a doctor of laughter whose books remain, in our very different world, a perfect cure of melancholy.
