Rabelais's capacious, encyclopedic, voracious imagination makes singular demands on his would-be readers; his text repays attention with the reward not only (or merely) of knowledge, but also of learning, of understanding, and of play. The embodiments of appetite, his principal characters are as monstrous in energy as they are in size, driven by a thirst for knowledge and experience which seems to encompass the whole of creation. The first two books, in detailing the educational programs followed by successive generations of giant, take us from “the dark . . . , the infelicity and calamity of the Goths,” through to an age in which “light and dignity [have been] restored to letters,” and to learning (F160/H243). Gargantua's letter to his son, in which this excitement is given voice as the new age dawns, reads as an emblem of that cultural moment which successive generations of scholars have described, discredited, and redescribed as the Renaissance.