François Rabelais
c. 1494–1553 · France
“In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do what thou wilt.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through François Rabelais
Drew From(3)
who shaped François Rabelais
via Praise of Folly
- Standing behind Rabelais's giants is Erasmus — in a 1532 letter Rabelais called him "my spiritual father and mother," owing everything to his writings
- Praise of Folly supplied the satirical voice and the targets: pedants, hypocrites, the self-serious — Rabelais simply made it bigger, bawdier, and more riotous
- Reading Erasmus first reveals the scholarly mischief underneath the toilet humor; this is humanist satire grown to giant size
via The Golden Ass
- Gargantua and Pantagruel descends from the ancient comic novel, and Apuleius is one of its named forebears
- The Golden Ass's grotesque, episodic, magic-soaked storytelling is the lineage Rabelais inherits — read it to see where his appetite for the lewd and the fantastical comes from
via Plutarch's Lives
- Rabelais read Plutarch closely — he quotes the Lives and the Moralia often enough that scholars list Plutarch among his core influences
- The biographical exempla scattered through the giants' adventures come straight out of the Lives; Plutarch is the classical ballast under all the bawdy invention
- Read it to see what a Renaissance humanist was mining when he reached for an ancient model
Inspired(3)
who François Rabelais shaped
- Sterne named Rabelais his favorite author and his master in humor — the line of descent is one he claimed openly in his letters
- He warmed up by drafting a "Rabelaisian Fragment" right before he began Tristram Shandy — the giant's anarchic energy is the engine under the whole book
- Rabelais even surfaces by name in the text: Walter Shandy warns Toby not to "look into Rabelais" — a wink at the source
- The grandfather of the satirical fantastic voyage — giants, grotesque scale, a loose-jointed romp through invented worlds
- Two centuries later Swift drains the laughter dry and points the joke at humanity: Rabelais's giants become Brobdingnag, his appetite for the absurd becomes a scalpel
- Coleridge's line says it best — Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco, the soul of Rabelais living in a dry place
- Hugo named Rabelais as one of his "three burlesque Homers" — with Ariosto and Cervantes — in the 1827 Preface to Cromwell, his Romantic manifesto on the power of the grotesque
- Four years later he poured that aesthetic into Quasimodo: the grotesque and the sublime fused in a single body
- And the Notre-Dame bells Quasimodo rings were first stolen by Rabelais's giant Gargantua — the line runs straight from the giant to the bell-ringer
Famous Quotes
“Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.”
“Do what you will.”
“Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.”
“Appetite comes with eating, says Angeston; but the thirst goes away with drinking.”
About François Rabelais
French Renaissance writer, physician, and humanist, author of the sprawling comic novels Gargantua and Pantagruel. His exuberant, scatological satire of medieval institutions and celebration of bodily life made 'Rabelaisian' synonymous with bawdy excess. He was also a serious scholar of medicine, law, and classical languages.