Rabelais's writing bristles with visible, subtle, or fictitious traces of other texts. Most obviously, like much sixteenth-century writing, it is saturated by the ancient texts, especially Greek and Roman, which humanists cherished. Yet the case of Rabelais is also specific. Even by his period's standards, the range of what he rewrites is extremely eclectic. He incorporates alien texts into narrative fiction in imaginative ways which constantly push the reader to confront self-consciously problems of interpretation. Some pre-existing texts are incorporated virtually verbatim or in the form of a translation, but without a quotation being signalled. Some are quoted, cited, paraphrased, parodied, satirized, alluded to. Some are clearly identified within Rabelais's text, others are not. Some provide him with motifs, narrative structures, styles, and specific terms, which he reworks. Many of these modes are vernacular variations on practices of imitation which were now taught in France in humanist colleges. Boys were trained to rewrite an ancient text in various ways, on a sliding scale of increasing distance from it, from translation (translatio) to paraphrase (paraphrasis) to imitation of its style and/or themes (imitatio in a narrow sense) to allusion (allusio). A single composition could rework several texts. This technique, known as contaminatio, is at work throughout Rabelais's chronicles.