François Rabelais

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Few writers in world literature have had as considerable an influence on letters and later authors or have garnered as much critical attention as François Rabelais. As the first great French prose author, Rabelais straddles the divide between his indebtedness to Greco-Latin, medieval, and contemporary traditions and the modernity of his style, preoccupations, and approaches. He truly incarnates what has come to be known as the transitional status of the Early Modern period by illustrating the continuous, gradual evolution of humanist thinking (and not the myth of a radical rupture that had long been identified with the Renaissance) in an age of tremendous religious, social, technological, and ideological upheaval. The modern period of Rabelais scholarship started with the Revue des études rabelaisiennes (1903–1912). Its focus on philology illustrated the need to rehabilitate an allegedly comic or obscene author by insisting on the texts’ heavy erudition and abundant classical sources containing serious hidden meaning. The Revue helped create the series Études rabelaisiennes (1953 to present; Librairie Droz, Geneva; Volume 57 appeared in 2019); this series, published in irregular intervals, is the most important resource for Rabelais scholars and publishes monographs, conference proceedings, and varia. The popularity of Rabelais studies has led to the creation of a second scholarly journal in 2017, the annual L’Année rabelaisienne, publishing varia, thematic dossiers, proceedings from workshops, and creative pieces in the Rabelaisian tradition (Librairie Classiques Garnier, Paris). The monograph section is published in a separate series at the same publisher, titled Les Mondes de Rabelais. Finally, another noteworthy journal is the Bulletin de l’Association des Amis de Rabelais et de la Devinière (since 1951). The 1953 collective volume commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Rabelais’s death marked the pinnacle of this approach of historical positivism and triggered Leo Spitzer’s famous 1960 polemical article in Studi francesi (“Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants,’” Spitzer 1960, cited under Modern Reception) in favor of a reorientation toward literary qualities of aesthetics, style, and language. This new approach dominated the 1960s and 1970s, leading up to the spirited debate on the prologue of Gargantua between “positivists” (represented primarily by Michael A. Screech, Gérard Defaux, and Edwin M. Duval) and “stylists” (led by Terence Cave, Michel Jeanneret, and François Rigolot) in the pages of the Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1985–1986), triggered by Duval’s fundamental article in Études rabelaisiennes 28 (1985). The essential question was whether Rabelais had intentionally hidden specific higher meanings in his text that could be found through erudition and philological research or whether the text consciously resists totalizing interpretations and was inherently polysemic and thus prone to constantly generating new meanings. The debate has not only invigorated Rabelais scholarship but has also led to a healthy middle ground between erudition, philology, and aestheticopoetic concerns since around 1990, which has advanced the study of this essential author considerably. Other noteworthy developments of the past few decades are the increasing scholarly interest in the long-neglected Third Book and Fourth Book, scrutiny of the controversial Fifth Book that goes well beyond the intriguing question of its authenticity and studies the text for its intrinsic literary qualities as well as, most recently, the study of material aspects, such as Rabelais’s library, his editorial activities, or his influence, aspects that hold important new clues for assessing his writing from fresh angles. Finally, owing to a stronger commitment to combine up-to-date scholarship (on literary, linguistic, and syntactic aspects) and pedagogy, general studies on individual volumes have been published more frequently lately to provide compact manuals for candidates preparing for the demanding French agrégation examinations.