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Rabelais's Unreadable Books*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Barbara C. Bowen
Barbara C. Bowen*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

About twenty-five years ago, in the lobby of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a friend introduced me to the already legendary Eugénie Droz. As kindly as her rather haughty manner permitted, she asked me what I was working on, and when I replied “Rabelais” she said condescendingly: “Oh, do you think there is any more work to be done on Rabelais?”

In the generation since that conversation a good deal of work has been done on Rabelais, much of it interesting and some of it new and exciting. M. A. Screech and his followers, most notably Jean Céard, Edwin Duval, and Florence Weinberg, have greatly expanded our understanding of Rabelais the Evangelical Christian humanist; Carol Clark and Samuel Kinser have corrected many of Bakhtin's outdated views on Rabelais and carnival; Walter Stephens has illuminated Renaissance attitudes to giants and their relevance to Rabelais.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 742 - 758
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1995

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Footnotes

*

This article is a slightly revised version of the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture delivered at the 1994 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America at the University of North Texas in Denton. I hope that its origin will adequately excuse its style, which is rather more colloquial than I would normally consider suitable for this august publication. Much of the research for the article was done in France in 1988-89, thanks to an NEH Senior Fellowship. The list of colleagues who have advised and encouraged me is too long to reproduce here, but I must acknowledge the invaluable assistance and tireless good will of David Bright, James Mehl, Bill Race, and Susan Wiltshire. Thanks also to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, the Bibliothèque Municipale de Tours, the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours (especially Mile Simon), the Vanderbilt Library (especially Yvonne Boyer), and to my indefatigable research assistant, Christie Carlucci.

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