SOURCE: “The Fantasies of ‘Mad Rabelais’: Exploiting the Unreal,” in Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 146-95.

[In the excerpt below, Prescott traces the influence of Rabelais's ideas about fantasy toRenaissance writers and artists.]

In a culture that is ambivalent about the mental powers that can set lovers' eyes rolling or lead a nervous nocturnal traveler to suppose a bush a bear, Rabelais's fantasy seemed variously repellent or engaging. Either way, it was rhetorically useful. Michael Drayton jokingly calls Rabelais himself mad. Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie (1627), a mock epic about the tiny fairy knight Pigwiggen, names earlier triflers:

Olde Chaucer doth of Topas tell
Mad Rablais of Pantagruell,
A latter third of Dowsabell,
With such poore trifles playing.(1)

Drayton plays deftly with perspective: Sir Topas encounters the giant Olyphant, and the maker of tiny pigwiggen remembers Pantagruel. And because his speedy tetrameters describe small beings who suffer an insanity worse than Orlando's, undergo more adventures than Don Quixote, fight in fishscale armor, descend to the underworld, and practice magic, he clearly shares Rabelais's interest in fanciful disproportion.

Others thought Rabelais not so much mad as the maker of concoctions that figured madness in the real world.

PANTAGRUEL'S DREAMS AND THE STUART MASQUE

James I enjoyed coarse foolery, and for political (and perhaps sentimental) reasons he encouraged rustic festivity and sport. When watching court entertainments, though, he liked to see monstrosity curbed.² In Stuart masques, when form and light triumph over confused obscurity, the resolution finds a largely neoclassical expression, one sustained by the Italian (or French) sources for Inigo Jones's sets and costumes.³ Yet ambiguities remain. Like carnival, reformation lives off enormity—a Justice Overdo needs a Bartholomew Fair, just as Jones's perspective lines speed more effectively toward their vanishing point thanks to the clouds or shrubbery against and through which they move. The more urgent the classicizing imperatives of the masque's aesthetics, the more urgent the need for gaps, bulges, mixtures, and fantasy. The value to Jones and his colleagues of earlier tastes in foolishness should not be underestimated.

It is thus agreeable to find that in addition to the modish Italian and French artists a more old-fashioned draftsman helped costume the Stuart masque, one whose printer credited his work to Rabelais. In 1565 Richard Breton, a Huguenot printer with London ties, published in Paris a collection of grotesques, stating on the title page that they are “de l’invention de maistre François Rabelais: et derniere oeuvre d’iceluy, pour la recreation des bons esprits” (Invented by Master François Rabelais, his last work, for the recreation of good and happy spirits). Whatever invention means here, Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel is not by Rabelais. The artist was almost certainly François Desprez, who had affixed his anagrammatized name to the preface of a similar collection, the Recueil de la diversité des habits, also published by Breton. The pictures owe something to Hieronymous Cock's prints of Bruegel, although they appear in isolation, one to a page, with no defining context.⁴

These are dreams, says Breton's brief preface, of the excellent and marvelous Pantagruel, once celebrated for his heroic deeds, of whom some more-than-truthful histories admirably tell. Nor did Panurge ever see more admirable things on his last travels (perhaps an allusion to the Navigations de Panurge).⁵ We are invited to study these marvels closely, for Breton says teasingly that he will leave to others the “sens mistique.” Some of the figures’ codpieces would stun Panurge, yet the images are not obscene, and only a few imply an upside-down world—Pantagruel imagines nothing so clear as reversal but rather dreams up incongruities and monsters. Breton knows the dreams will not please everyone, for many people are themselves “lunatiques”; others will be amused, and maybe “bons esprits” will use them for “mascarades.” In fact, some clever English wits did just that.

There are hints that Songes was known in England before the Stuart masques began. The earliest may be a remark by “E.D.” [Daunce?] in his Prayse of Nothing (1585) that although some might condemn a fuss over nothing, those “delighted in the study hereof” should also see “the macheronicall phantasies of Merlinus Cocaius, and slaepie Phantasmata of Francois Rabilois, men greatly traveled in this business” (sig. hiv). This could refer to Panurge's dream in TL 14, or even to Habert's Songe de Pantagruel (1542), yet the context, the word slaepie, the plural Phantasmata, and contemporary connotations of phantasm suit Songes. Not that “E.D.” relishes fantasy; despite impertinent logic and a few jokes, his largely semantic paradoxes serve straightforward claims. Uppitiness of the imagination worries him, as do subjects who “floate over the landmarke of due obedience, for no other cause … then for nothing” and “woulde drawe the governments of Princes to the ordinary rule of themselves” and “undermine their naturall dwellings, and countrye walles.”

There is also evidence that English playwrights knew Songes. Barnabe Barnes's Divils Charter (1607) is a drama of treachery, attempted sodomy, and corruption that, as one might expect in a play put on at court soon after the Gunpowder Plot, shows “the Strumpet of proud Babylon, / Her Cup with fornication foaming full.” As the ruffian Frescobaldi, thinking he is alone, makes wild thrusts and passadoes, a fellow villain exclaims:

What Mandragon or salvage Ascapart,
what Pantaconger or Pantagruell
Art thou that fightest with thy fathers soul
Or with some subtill apparitions
Which no man can behould with mortall eyes.
Or art thou ravished with bedlamy
Fighting with figments and vaine fantazies
Chimeraes or blacke spirrits of the night.

(III.v)⁶

This Pantagruel, hallucinator and not hallucination, is no noble Utopian prince, although the hint that Frescobaldi is both giant and father-fighter touches briefly on a submerged generational conflict, which gives depth to Gargantua's concerned paternity and his son's loyalty.⁷ The whiff of false diabolism—the play has a real devil as well, as if to hedge Barnes's pneumatological bets—is strengthened by Frescobaldi's claim to be the ghost of the king of Calcutta; his companion pretends to conjure him by “Mulli-sacke” (sherry) and “purple Aligant the bloudy gyant” (alicant is a Spanish wine). Barnes's Pantagruel seems to combine Rabelais's giant, here read as an impious rebel, with the stagy phantasms that Breton claimed Rabelais dreamed up, in a context in which wine begets demonic giants—or names of giants.

It is in such an air of dementia, I have argued above, that Webster's Bracciano goes to his death in The White Devil (1612), dying a few moments before Flamineo's impudent invocation of Lucian/Rabelais. Poisoned and “fall’n into a strange distraction,” Bracciano thinks he sees someone “In a blew bonnet, and a paire of breeches / With a great codpeece. Ha, ha, ha, / Looke you his codpeece is stucke full of pinnes / With pearles o’th head of them” (V.iii.99-102). Editors usually explain that such codpieces were a “fashion of the time,” although the scanty evidence comes from the sixteenth century.⁸ But the context of “brain-sicke language,” together with the codpiece's size and the pins' pearl heads, recalls SD 60: the creature wears a bonnet, if no breeches, and a sardonic smile. According to Bracciano, his devil is “a rare linguist,” and he hopes to “dispute with him.”⁹ I cannot prove that Webster (or the costumer, if the figure was visible) had seen Desprez's over-sexed smiler, but it seems likely, and the vision certainly recalls the atmosphere surrounding some evocations of Rabelais or his inventions: tensely ludic, tricky, lunatic, deceptively diabolic.

The first trace of Songes I detect in the masques comes in Ben Jonson's Vision of Delight, performed on Twelfth Night 1617. Early in the masque, Delight summons Night, who will “all awake with phantoms keep, / And those to make delight more deep.” Night then calls on Fant'sy: “Now all thy figures are allowed, / And various shapes of things.” Fant'sy emerges from a cloud to give a long speech that Stephen Orgel calls a “verbal antimasque” and Night calls a “waking dream.”¹⁰ “Songes drolatiques” are exactly what Fant'sy produces—not high vatic dreams but drolleries. Admitting, like Breton, that no one dream pleases everybody, she makes a crowd of them, a tumble of absurdity and metamorphosis. After Fant'sy's speech an antimasque of phantoms comes forth, and one can assume that some would correspond roughly to figures from the preceding evocation. I quote from Fant'sy's speech, identifying some drollerics in Songes that the dreams recall. They may have analogues elsewhere, but I cannot locate any beyond a few in Cock's Bruegel. Nowhere outside Songes, it seems important to stress, is there such a concentration of parallels:

And Fant'sy, I tell you, has dreams that have wings
And dreams that have honey, and dreams that have stings;(11) [SD 116]
Dreams of the maker and dreams of the teller,
Dreams of the kitchen and dreams of the cellar.(12)
Your ostrich, believe it, 's no faithful translator
Of perfect Utopian; and then it were an odd piece
To see the conclusion peep forth at a codpiece.(13)
[SD 10]
The politic pudding hath still his two ends, [SD 85]
Though the bellows and bagpipe were nev’r so good friends.(14) [SD 82, 74]
If a dream should come in now to make you afeard,
With a windmill on his head and bells at his beard,(15)
Would you straight wear your spectacles here at your toes,
And your boots o’ your brows, and your spurs o’ your nose?(16) [SD 5, 8]
If the bell have any sides, the clapper will find ’em. [SD 32]
There's twice so much music in beating the tabor [SD 34]
As i’th stockfish, and somewhat less labor.
For grant the most barbers can play o’ the cittern,
Is it requisite a lawyer should plead to a gittern?(17)
[SD 96]
The haunches of a drum with the feet of a pot [SD 65]
And the tail of a Kentishman to it—why not?

(Ll. 53-102)¹⁸

Eventually dawn brings light, order, and royalty.

Jonson's procedure is quite unlike that of Davenant and Jones's later Luminalia (1638). There, too, dream yields to “brightness” and Night gives pleasure: she will

Produce fantastic creatures of the night,
Though not t’advance, yet vary their delight;
All that our striving mystery presents
Will be but foils to nobler ornaments.(19)

Jonson's own phantasmata have a more important task: they “vary” but “deepen” delight. Davenant's City of Sleep is less ridiculous than mysterious: the masque has given up the carnivalesque for strange trees, golden mountains, falling towers, windmills, and a rainbow city. There is, however, an allusion to Rabelais: one antimasquer (played by the queen's dwarf) is Piecrocal, a captain who serves Oberon. He must be named for Utopia's bilious enemy, Picrochole. It is right that this lovely escapist spectacle should have a braggart whose global ambitions first satirized Charles V but who is now prettified for Henri IV's daughter into a diminutive servant of the Fairy King.

Jonson's phantasms serve more than “delight,” for his antimasque is dramatically integrated into the night's revels. Jonson and Jones must have found Songes useful in this regard precisely because its silliness creates a realm not so much opposed to courtly harmony as anterior to it, sustaining it. This construction of a suspect but vital irrationality matters whether we read the masques in their political context or, more generally, as representing the mind. The derangements that Songes illustrates come from a part of the soul—fancy—that for all its dangers relates intimately to freedom and creativity. Pantagruel's drolleries are cousins of figures like Opinion, Fantasy, Mania, and Capriccio; requiring reform or banishment, they are not in themselves evil.²⁰ The implications for the Stuart court's political culture are serious. No government welcomes lunacy or subversion, yet the rigidity of the Stuarts' attempted absolutism seems tied to a reluctance to permit fertile disorder into the upper reaches of mind and state as readily as Le Strange said James let his own excrement climb collarwards. Although Jonson upheld the king's theories, his imagination, like the king's body, said something more complicated.

On Twelfth Night 1618, the court saw Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. We have seen that Jonson's “bouncing belly,” Comus, is cousin to Rabelais's Gaster, but the masque may also have a trace of Songes. Apparently a tun and some flasks danced an antimasque, and among Desprez's grotesques are two walking barrels (SD 42 and 120); the second leaks into little creatures drinking the liquor.²¹ Whatever his source, Jonson's possibly Pantagruelian barrel as well as his genuinely Rabelaisian belly indicate those pleasures that unshape and “extinguish man” (l. 98), as Hercules says when rejecting them, yet that remain as basic as dreams. The masque failed to please, and when Jonson reworked it as For the Honor of Wales, performed a few weeks later, he apologized. One character in the new antimasque of Welshmen explains: “There was neither poetries nor architectures nor designs in that belly-god, nor a note of musics abut him”; another praises the new goat dance as “a properly natural device … no tuns, nor no bottles.”²² The Rabelaisian or Songes style is unnatural and irrational, but goats, one could argue, are half-way to being ancient satyrs.

For the next few years Jonson's antimasques, although figuring the rude or ridiculous, avoided the phantasmagoric. Then, in Neptune's Triumph (written for Twelfth Night 1624 but unperformed), Jonson once more turned not only to Rabelais—a reference to his oracle of the bottle almost defiantly recuperating the offending vessels of Pleasure—but also, I think, to Songes. Celebrating the safe return of Prince Charles, wifeless, from Spain, the masque opens with a dialogue between two artists, a poet and a cook. The poet, who prefers the cellar to the kitchen, expresses such scorn for antimasques (“heterogene … outlandish nothings,” ll. 157-60) that some readers have been misled into thinking Jonson himself disdained them.²³ Undeterred, probably because he too speaks for Jonson, the cook summons out of his stewpot an antimasque led by “Amphibion” Archy, the king's dwarf. This production number is a satirical hodgepodge, an ironically (because Hispanically) named “olla podrida” of state rumor and gossip. The cook pours out enormity and unreason and thus also prima materia for the shaping imagination; without it, there would be nothing to harmonize. Jones's designs are hard to interpret, even assuming that they have been accurately identified.²⁴ No sources have been found. One fishy creature is structured like Songes 18, although his snout is that of a Renaissance dolphin and he has acquired a hat. There are fish-men in Bruegel and Bosch, but Jones's image resembles that of Desprez in having arms and an upright posture. In any case, Jones's costumes are closer in style to Songes than to his usual sources. As in Delight, alien elements enlarge the stylistic range.

One other piece of evidence comes in the multi-authored Faire Maide of the Inn (1625), a sort of antimasque that includes faked conjuring and a frog dance. Forobosco, “a cheating mountebank,” talks his gulls into such get-rich-quick schemes as starting a new religion in Germany or investigating fashions on the moon. In one plan, an Englishman in the monster-exhibiting trade will go to meat-poor Madrid and astound the locals by roasting an English ox: “That would be the eight[h] wonder of the world in those parts,” going “beyond all their garlike Olla Podrithoes, though you sod one in Gargantuas cauldron—bring in more mony, then all the monsters of Affrick.”²⁵ This is the only cauldron of Gargantua that I know of, and it has an “olla podrida,” just like the pot in Neptune's Triumph, printed shortly before this play was published. It too cooks up monsters and anti-Spanish humor. Maybe this is a reference to the chapbook giant, yet the coincidence remains; the writer (Webster is a strong possibility) could have read or heard of Jonson's pot and its fantastic creatures, seen a connection with Desprez and Rabelais, and made a mental slide to the other giant.

Once more, though, Jonson came to be—or was made to be—uncomfortable with this style of fantasy. So he revised, turning his failed Triumph into The Fortunate Isles and exchanging his stew for more reasonable fantasies. Skelton, Scoggin, and others in the new antimasque are unpolished but more “natural” than the ambulatory artichoke, fish-man, and other monsters Jonson had planned the year before. For the second time Desprez's manner had been only fleetingly useful, as though the play of styles Jonson manages so well in Delight had become harder to sustain or more difficult for audiences to enjoy. Pantagruel's dreams would be used again, but as objects of satire only.

Rabelais's name—and perhaps Desprez's designs—appear briefly in James Shirley's Triumph of Peace (1634). Peace was designed in part to criticize country gentry with fancy court notions, as well as monopolistic “projectors” who were hoping to get rich. One antimasque satirizes the inventiveness that irked those worried by greed-serving “novelty.” After Fancy (“prince of th’ air” and “bird of night”) makes his way past the court guard, not by violence but “With jests / Which they are less able to resist,” the scene changes to a tavern, a world of bottle-fed fantasy if not of the oracle of the bottle. Socially there is a demotion as well: the imagination flies up on alcoholic vapor but comes from further down the mental and economic scale. Now Fancy, hermaphrodite child of Mercury and Venus, presents a set of “projections,” such as a refrigerated bridle, an automatic thresher, a double-boiler, and diving equipment.²⁶ When Novelty's husband, Opinion, sees this last figure he asks, “But what thing's this? A chimera out of Rabelais?” Fancy calls it a “new project”:

A case to walk you all day under water,
So vast for the necessity of air,
Which, with an artificial bellows cool’d
Under each arm, is kept still from corruption.
With those glass eyes he sees, and can fetch up
Gold, or whatever jewels ha’ been lost,
In any river o’ the world.

(Ll. 369-78)

Since Gargantua et Pantagruel has nothing like this “chimera,” and since Chimera had strong links with “phantasm” and “dream” (see the Oxford English Dictionary) as well as with monstrous heterogeneity, it is likely that Opinion is thinking of Songes. No one drollery fits these lines, but many have its ingenuity, and SD 14 contains a case, what could be a glass observation panel, and some fish.

These “projections” seem less clearly derived from some deeper world than do the dreams of Jonson's Delight. Significantly, Shirley's feathered and batwinged Fancy exits “fearfully” when Peace appears, whereas Jonson's Fant’sy presents and identifies the king. For all its uncertainties, its allegiance that hovers between the discontented lawyers for whom Shirley wrote and the king whom the Inns of Court wished to please, Peace shows a more absolute rejection of dreams. In the meantime, “Rabelais” is evoked in a tavern and linked not to the grotesque—for the fantasy here is too mechanical to suit a book margin or doorway—but to individual whimsy masquerading as socially productive invention. It is as though Quaresmeprenant had loved Rube Goldberg and laid their misbegotten baby at the patent office door. Shirley means us to laugh, and we do: this puffing pseudogrotesque scuba diver is liminal after all, making his way out of the tavern on the wave of the future.

Peace ends with dawn—an illusory dawn for Charles I. In William Davenant's Salmacida Spolia (performed January 21, 1640) some have seen signs of growing strain. The masque's editor T.J.B. Spencer calls it “a kind of exorcism aimed at the subversive forces abroad in England.”²⁷ The villain is Discord, a “malicious Fury” who appears in a storm (1). In Renaissance iconology, storms often allegorize Fortune, beating in vain against Fortitude and Charity. There may be something of that meaning here too: the title claims a sweatless and bloodless conquest by reason and love, “sine sanguine sine sudore,” of misfortune due to external tumult and not to Charles's own actions.²⁸ Discord unleashes antic figures that demonstrate how hard it is to “cure / The People's folly” (178-79), but they are halted by the king under the name “Philogenes or Lover of his People” (12). Among them are “Four grotesques or drollities, in the most fantastical shapes that could be devised” (242-43).

Fittingly, in a work citing the Rosicrucians and with a “Wolfgangus Vandergoose” among the characters, this antimasque has a northern, Bruegelesque flavor. The four “drollities,” as one might guess from their name, are taken straight from Songes. The top figure in Orgel and Strong's figure 427 of Inigo Jones is copied closely from SD 31, although Jones has shrunk his codpiece; the lower figure reverses and simplifies SD 106. The other drollities, Orgel and Strong's figure 428, are based on SD 77 and 64. The former is now less grotesque about the face and has no cutlery, but his shoes and attitude are the same, and his codpiece outdoes that of his model; the latter has changed his arm position and his direction, but the heavy features remain, as does the hat. Pantagruel's dreams, although not among his most fantastic, provide the style of a past age, as though English rebels were old-fashioned as well as crazy. Also significant is a further shift in how the dreams illustrate unreason. Fantasy is here further diminished: no longer a fruitful if limited mode of seeing, it is not even (as it had been for Shirley) a source of early capitalist dementia. Figures like those of Desprez or “Rabelais” now indicate a specific political menace to a kingdom in early revolution, fully embodying the psychological and political inversion that threatens parallel hierarchies of apprehension, reason, and opinion and king, court, and commons. The integration of masque and antimasque that deepens Johnson's best work has come further undone, as witness the harshness with which these “dreams” are not so much superseded as exiled—bad news, in fact, for Charles, who should have listened harder to his drollities.

Allusions to Rabelais or Pantagruel by “E.D.,” Barnes, and Shirley that link him to Desprez's manner would reinforce his reputation as a fabulating namer of idle nothings; if some enjoyed such nothings, others used his name to conjure up thoughts of feigning or lies. In either case, English reaction shows ambivalence toward poesis, the power of words to make monsters ex nihilo and then allow the nihil to spread in a negative ontological contagion. Those who took the printer Breton's word that his “songes” were the “invention” of Rabelais could assume that the author of Gargantua, Pantagruel, and parodic prognostications (possibly including Admirables and the Navigations) had once more played Phantastes. Written reaction to Rabelais's creation of forms such as never were in nature inscribed significant issues: the mental and cultural role of the imaginative faculty, the legitimacy of fiction and the marvelous, the reality and nature of nothing and negation, the nightmares of religious or theological illusion, and the social and spiritual risk of “projections,” whether inventions like those Jones staged or the insubstantial pageants generated by fear and desire.

THE FABULATIONS OF IMPIETY

Physically, marvels and monsters were concentrated at the margins of the medieval and early modern world, but culturally they were central to the European imagination. Some writers found in Rabelais (or para-Rabelais) a monstrosity producing less pleasure than dismay—negative wonder. That they personally feared the imagination may be doubted but not the cultural fact of that fear and its usefulness in polemic. The rhetoric of negative wonder deflates an enemy by refusing to take him seriously, while simultaneously using images of enlargement and monstrosity to show the threat he poses to others. Caesar is a mortal who puffs himself up, says Shakespeare's Cassius, but he is also a Colossus who bestrides the earth and endangers the republic. He is little, so we can kill him; he is too big, so we ought to. Exploiting both an ancient suspicion of fantasy and an equally ancient taste for marvels and astonishment, negative wonder is an analogue of the giant-pygmy pairing—that anamorphic monster one might call “Gargatom.”

At times, then, English writers appropriate or cite Rabelaisian fantasy to indicate what has gone horribly yet risibly wrong in the minds of others. The issues raised are not trivial; they include worries concerning illusion, consumption, and the Mass. Not all references to Rabelais and (para-)Rabelaisian giants are hostile, and one fantasy of engulfment is literally entertaining: William Lithgow's Most Delectable, and True, Discourse … of a Peregrination in Europe, Asia and Affricke (1623 ed.) praises the Pratolino gardens for trees, ponds, “artificial fountaines,” and “exquisite banqueting roome, contrived among sounding unseene waters, in forme of Gargantus body” (sig. Bb2v). This must be the colossal Apennines, carved from living rock by Giovanni Bologna in the 1580s.²⁹ The statue contained a dining room and also had a dovecot in its head, as though it were as flutter-brained as the fanciful sculptor who made it. To eat inside a giant, giving new depth to the phrase “mise en abîme,” might put the symbolically sensitive off their feed: fantasy, like a giant, can take us in.

Protestants thought that among Christendom's worst fantasies was the belief that bread can be transubstantiated into Christ's body by the mere hocus pocus of a “Hoc est corpus.” That is why giants' open-mouthed size and comic fictionality made them good symbols of “papist” lunacy, of negative wonder. Do Catholics say they eat God? The cannibals!³⁰ Giants eat people, too, for although they have too much flesh already, they want more. They are the letter made ever more fleshly by a misreading of Christ's words at the Last Supper. And because giants are also rebels (like recusants), tyrants (like the pope), mocking boasters (like Catholic polemicists), and sexually perverse (like monks), Protestants found them valuable for attacking the Mass and other “popish” illusions. That such name-calling was satiric did not make it more genial, as witness Alexander Cooke's growling remark in More Worke for a Masse-Priest (1621) that “according to Poperie, A man may eate his god with his teeth, as a Cyclops ate Ulysses companions” (sig. A2). On the other hand, since giants are for the most part imaginary, Cooke can also underline his belief that Catholics fool themselves. The problem is that they fool others, too, engulfing them in an abyss of illusion.

Thomas Scott was adept at projecting negative wonder, a mixture of snorting contempt and justified fear. His Digitus Dei (1623), written to advance his widely noted if imprudent campaign against James's foreign policy, is a sermon on the warning in Luke 13 to repent or perish. It has much to say about Catholic “Poetical fictions,” the Gunpowder Plot (fed by poisoned “Romish Milke” from Rome's “Adulterate Teates”), and God's terrible swift sword. Although condemning them, Scott opened his imagination to giants and wonders: Cardinal Robert Bellarmine is a “Romish Goliah,” he says, whose arguments could not “wrest the Staffe and Sling” out of James's hand, while atheism is a “Monster” accompanying the “Dwarfe Ignorance.” Scott is interested chiefly in the destruction that God's punitive digit can cause—hence his title. Why does God finger certain buildings? Why burn a house in which papists had been saying Mass but spare the nearby Fortune Theater? Because theaters, like brothels, do not pretend to be other than what they are, whereas Catholics call their false shows true. When the Fortune later caught fire, he explains, this was punishment not for staging plays but for doing so on the Sabbath.

After the Catholic house's fire, says Scott, had anyone—even “equivocating” recusants—witnessed communion “Cakes” rise again “from under the ruines,” Scott might have believed in the Mass. As it is, he will go on thinking of papists as themselves transubstantiated by Circe's “Cup of Abhominations” into such “Don Quixshots or Gorgantuahs as would eat up their God Almightie at a mouthfull” or, rather, “imagine themselves to be such Monsters as could doe it” (sig. D4v). The body, including Christ's, and how to relate it to the Word and words is the issue, as is fantasy. Catholics have “rob’d our Saviour of Head, Heart, Hands, Feet, of a true Body, of his Humanitie.” In this fancied theft, the Gorgonized “Gorgantuah” is pure monster—a Polyphemus, a folklore cannibal, a Gogmagog-cum-Saturn. He is thus imaginatively real, although of course Scott's point is that Catholics merely think they are cannibals. By summoning a giant associated with “Legendarie stuffe” (sig. B1), Scott can have his polemical cake and eat it: the Mass is terrible in its dark rites, its blood and raw flesh, and yet at the same time laughable—not transbut insubstantial. Whether Scott's mockery has actually exorcised illusion is another matter, for “Gorgantuah” the theophage is a powerful figure.

Rabelais himself, as a name and author, could be useful to Protestant argument in part because his fantasies are, like the Mass, deliberately created fictions. Not only do his giants take in a pilgrim here, an author there: their creator was interested in the nature of bodies, words, and space. So although (or even because) Rabelais was neither clearly Protestant nor clearly Catholic, his name could be evoked in scoffs at papist illusion.

De missa papistica … adversus Robertum Bellarminum (1603), by Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter, is an angry book: angry at transubstantiation, at fantasy, at impiety. A fierce debater, in 1609 Sutcliffe founded a short-lived college in Chelsea dedicated to fighting recusancy with study and polemics; James I laid the cornerstone. Here, Sutcliffe tackles Bellarmine with gusto. The cardinal's deceptions, he asserts, rely on a misunderstanding of Christ's “This is my body.” Yes, communion bread “mysticè, et symbolicè, et sacramentaliter verè est corpus Christi” (is truly Christ's body in a mysterious, symbolic, and sacramental fashion). To take it as literal flesh, though, is to deal insanely with “Chimeras” and to take Christ's words “carnally.” This is not just a matter of reading with the flesh rather than with the spirit, of sticking to signifiers and missing the signified. The mistake is literal: one imagines that one is eating flesh in a literally bloody carnality. This is profoundly unnatural, says Sutcliffe, for normal people flee inhuman “anthropophagi.”

Bellarmine, then, argues “ridiculè.” Indeed, says Sutcliffe, the cardinal's reasons are such “quod vix in fabulis pantagruelinis fingere ausus est impius ille fabulator Rabelaisius” (that the impious fabulator Rabelais would hardly have dared feign in his fictions about Pantagruel, sigs. Ffi-Ffiv). The sarcasm is neither arbitrary nor comfortable. Debates on the Eucharist necessarily involved assumptions about signs. Can bread be a sign if its substance collapses into the signified flesh? Signs require difference, not identity. Because Catholics concede that the bread continues (accidentally, as it were) to look and taste like bread, the question of what happens to its substance is tied to the reality of a world in which the sacrament's actuality, whatever that might be, is taking place. One Christian's invisible realm may be another's Cloud-cuckooland, yet no Protestant could discount all invisibilia and remain Christian. Rabelais and Bellarmine fabulate impiously—but Sutcliffe, too, believes in things that nobody can see.

Patrick Forbes, future bishop of Aberdeen, was likewise impatient with figments. He wrote A Defence of the Lawful Calling of the Ministers of Reformed Churches (1614) to vindicate the right of Protestant clergymen to claim an Apostolic succession: despite the rupture with the pope, they have an unbroken tie to Saint Peter through the successive laying-on of hands at ordination. This topic, too, invites serious thought on the relation of ancient words and gestures to the present and on the difficulty of historically tracing something real but invisible—and hence subject to the charge that it is fantasized. Forbes, whom the DNB calls “good, godly, and kind,” was understandably annoyed at being termed a “glorying Goliath” by a recusant reader, and his title page asserts sharply that the “impertinent and rediculously deceitfull” questions answered in this tract were written in his adversary's “dottage.” A major topic is the misused imagination, a sensitive issue precisely because Forbes defends a Church that he not only concedes but insists is “invisible”: ancient, Apostolically descended, and, unlike the pope's all-too-material church, perceived only by the faithful. The true church's age and invisibility was vital to Reformation claims, for without some such theory Protestants would have been even more vulnerable to the charge that they dealt in mere novelties fabricated by Opinion.

His church, Forbes thinks, has been there right along, unseen, hidden within the false and visible one. Catholics are the feigners. They pretend that the Antichrist is yet to come, whereas the Gospel's “waxing light” shows that he is here, in Rome. This makes them “paint out … Chimeraes, wherby they may stupifie and detaine foolish hearts in expectation of such an Antichrist, as shall come, I warrant you, ad grecas Calendas.” The papists' Antichrist must be some “dumb Devil” begotten “betwix some feind or fairie, and a devised Daniel, who hath I warrant you, two thousand yeares agoe, lost all the writings of his genealogie.” Catholics try to “delude the Worlde, with such foolishe fantasies”; and indeed some people are deluded. Why? By “perversenes of mindes and guiltines of conscience,” they “runne to such doting dreames, and ridiculous raveries, as, albeit they were not refelled [confuted] by cleare Scripture, yet, were fitter to bee an addition to Rables, or to make up the last booke of Amades de Gaule, then to bee reputed profound pointes of Christian wisedome” (sigs. D1, I3v-I4). Rabelais, then, is a fantasy-monger. The affiliation with romance is intriguing, for Rabelais's work had begun as an “addition” to the chapbooks, just as other writers did indeed make “additions” to his works, and just as (said reformers) Catholics had added to God's word and laws. Amadis, especially, in a fine demonstration of romance's antipathy to closure, received addition upon addition. To the making of fictions there is no end, and Forbes's train of thought implies that fictional theology will stop only when the equally fictional Greek kalends finally arrive.

Secular fantasy may have distressed some people because it is a reminder that things invisible to mortal sight may be so because they are, quite simply, not there. The common phrase “you’re just seeing things” may apply to the “Pantagruel” in The Divils Charter who fences with air, but faith itself rests on the evidence of things unseen. If Chimeras are hard to see, so, nowadays, are virgin mothers and talking snakes. “Wisdome is Queene,” says the anonymous Apollo Christian, or Helicon Reformed (1617), when objecting to fictions like Saint George's fight with the dragon, and Wisdom “fareth not with Faëries” (Sig. C2v).³¹ But what if Wisdom is just a fairy? In turning around to laugh at his own fictions, Rabelais plays with a truth both uncomfortable and exhilarating: much in Scripture would not be out of place in works that many condemned as fantastic. Hence the disgust or delight some have found in thinking that his genealogies, for example, mock their biblical counterparts. When Rabelais claims that nothing in his account of Gargantua's nonvaginal birth violates Christian faith (an earlier edition quotes Paul on how “Charity believeth all things”), it is easy to see how some concluded that he found the Gospel as improbable as tales about giants.

It is more likely that Rabelais agreed with Erasmus's comment on the adage Sileni Alcibiadis: like Sileni, some passages in the Gospels seem foolish but are wise within. Thomas Browne had something like this in mind when remarking in Religio medici that he has read without harm such skeptics as Lucian even though “there are in Scripture Stories that do exceed the Fables of Poets, and to a captious Reader sound like Garagantua or Bevis.” (The spelling suggests the chapbook giant, although a few lines later Browne mentions Rabelais). Browne is not a captious reader; for him charity does indeed entail believing if not all things then a great many. But he has flirted with calling Scripture fantasy, evoking in order to exorcise a Lucianic “Rhetorick of Satan” that may “pervert a loose or pre-judicate belief.”³² Nor is it the Bible alone that makes Browne remember Rabelais or almost-Rabelais. His Pseudoxia epidemica (1646) recounts with genial skepticism (for there was also much in which he did not believe) the tale of Milo, the Greek athlete “who by daylie lifting a Calfe, attained an ability to carry it being a Bull.” This, says Brown dryly, “is a witty conceit, and handsomely sets forth the efficacy of Assuefaction [habituation].” They say that in the Olympics “for the space of a furlong, he carryed an Oxe of foure yeares upon his shoulders; and the same day hee carried it in his belly; for as it is there delivered he eate it up himselfe: Surely he had beene a proper guest at Grandgousiers feast, and might have matcht his throat that eate sixe pilgrims for a salad.” The margin says “In Rabelais.”³³ Browne recalls the somatic energy of Gargantua, its pleasure in the thought of sheer intake; but he does so in the context of what the wise may believe and what they will take as fantasy.

Theaters, as Scott says, work openly in the figment trade; unlike churches, they may lawfully peddle falsehood. I close this section with the Rabelais of Jasper Mayne—playwright, translator of Lucian, and royalist divine—who entangles theatrical fantasy and religion in his worldly Citie Match, performed at Whitehall and published at Oxford in 1639. This comedy, filled with injokes and topical allusions, has moments of irreverence that might drive the theater's enemies to further censure, for Mayne flirts with impiety when he arranges for a fake religious rite (he had, says the DNB, a taste for “unseasonable practical jokes”). To make the fakery funnier, he attaches the name Rabelais to it. In Act IV the aptly named Plotwell tells Aurelia, who must marry so as to save their mutual fortune, that “The scene is laid already; / I have transformed an English Poet [one Salewit] into / A fine French Teacher, who shall joyne your hands / With a most learned legend out of Rabelais.” Later, Salewit reports that the counterfeit ceremony went off as planned in a French church (which served Huguenot refugees and required no marriage license): “I’ve read a Fiction out of Rabelais to ’em, / In a religious tone, which he [the deluded bridegroom] believes / For good French Liturgie. When I had done / There came a Christening.” Plotwell asks: “And didst thou baptize / Out of thy Rabelais too?” Drawing the line at counterfeiting a genuine sacrament (which marriage, for Protestants, is not), Mayne has his poet say: “No faith, I left ’em / In expectation of their Pastor.” If that pastor was anything like Calvin, he would have been aghast at what had been going on in his church. At last all is revealed, and Plotwell tells the bridegroom, the rich Mr. Warehouse, “Wonder not, Sir, you / Were married but in jest. Twas no church forme, / But a fine Legend out of Rabelais” (sigs. L2v, O2v, R2v).³⁴

Mayne assumes an audience that can identify Rabelais (that the “fiction” is also a “legend” adds medieval overtones). It matters for the play's stratified social world that only the better-educated would know what to make of the name.³⁵ The allusion has a double function: it gives witty characters higher polish—more gloss, more glossolalia—while differentiating their multitongued and print-aware selves from the single-languaged, ignorant, and gullible. Some of the literate, though, might find Mayne's casual way with ritual disturbing, even while recognizing that the recitation of a merely literary text protected genuine rites from serious sacrilege. The risqué quality, the defiance of the Puritans whom the play derides, lies in the juxtaposition of the marriage ceremony and, of all things, “fictions” by the French Lucian. Satire spatters acid on innocent bystanders: the report of a bride and groom being joined by readings out of Gargantua et Pantagruel permits the mind to allow a libertine wit near a real church. This is why Rabelais and others who ridiculed what they saw as superstition could disturb those who might agree on the fact of falsity but feared parody's contamination: laughter at false belief can resound in a true one's churches.

Mayne's own take on fantasy's relation to faith was complex. Here Rabelaisian legend sits in a nested set of comic fictions. A decade later the human tendency to make things up looked more dangerous, now that revolutionary lunatics were claiming to perceive truths that were invisible to royalists. In a 1647 Sermon Against False Prophets, preached in Oxford “after the Surrender of that Garrison,” Mayne dismisses those prophesying against the king. Such seers “see” “visions, perhaps; But such as Aeneas in Virgil saw among the shades” (sig. A3v); in other words, “fictions.” We cannot eradicate images from language, or language from society, continues Mayne, but we can strive for clarity and not, like squids, blacken with ink the water in which we swim (sig. A4). Like many who detested flummery, Mayne cites Lucian (sig. C4v). Indeed, about the time he wrote The Citie Match he was translating Lucian's works, eventually publishing a lovely edition (1664) with a preface defending his author as a “sharpe” satirist “who reform’d the Times.” Lucian would know what to do with “Seditious, Rump Grammarians” and false preachers with “bubbles of Expression”: he “would doubtless send such Garagantua, tumid Orators to the Doctor who cured Lexiphanes of his Fustian disease” (sig. A3v-A4). Rabelais himself had prescribed a sort of Lexiphanic purge for his Limousin scholar. This adjectival Garagantua, though, with his tell-tale chapbook “a,” represents loudmouth rebels who need an emetic to help them vomit out their idle bombinations. Rebellious sectaries speak in Garagantuan bubbles; loyal royalists read Rabelais and Lucian.

NONBOOKS

Mayne's false clergyman reads from a genuine book—as a prayerbook it is a fantasy, but as a real volume it has bulk and dimension. Inside Pantagruel et Gargantua, however, are texts that exist only as titles and promises of books, holes in Rabelais's fiction that open onto nothingness or—depending on one's temperament—alternative realities.³⁶ Some sound attractive. Panurge's monograph on long codpieces would be the definitive study, and inhabitants of Pantagruel's inner world would have read with interest, had they been able to get hold of a copy, Alcofribas's Histoire des Gorgias, on his adventures in the giant's “gorge” (a pun on “gorgeously dressed” that may also glance at the sophist Gorgias, author of a lost treatise denying that anything is real, or if real knowable, or if known communicable). Oscillating between being and nonbeing, they are in some ways the librarian's equivalent of negative wonder.

Pantagruel's seventh chapter lists scores of such titles, some by real men, said to be in the famed (imaginary) library of Saint-Victor, in Paris.³⁷ Collectively, they exact a humanist and evangelical revenge on enemies of the new learning, making often scatological or indecent fun of obscurantist theologians, logic-chopping scholastics, outdated doctors, myopic glossators. Some “authors,” not least the Sorbonne's Noël Béda, had threatened the careers and lives of such men as Rabelais (and of his future patron, Marguerite de Navarre, whose Miroir de l’âme pécheresse Béda tried to have censored in 1533). In rhetorical effect, the library's titles are not unlike the satirically fantasized Letters of Obscure Men, by Ulrich von Hutten and others out to satirize scholastic obscurantism. Rabelais credits to the paunchy Béda, for example, a De optimitate triparum and to “Magister Ortuinum”—Ortwin, von Hutten's chief butt—an Ars honeste petandi in societate (The art of farting politely in society). One book might be useful to logicians: Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimera, in vacuo bombinans, possit comedere secundas intentiones, et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in concilio Constantiensi (A highly subtle question: Whether the Chimera, bombinating [buzzing, vibrating] in a vacuum, can eat second intentions, particularly as it was batted around for ten weeks at the Council of Constance). Not a bad conundrum.³⁸ A few other titles are given real authors; De patria diabolorum, for instance, is by “Merlinus Coccaius” (Folengo). Most, however, are unascribed.

Although this is Europe's first imaginary library, the notion of a book extant only in some future or parallel world was not new. The end of Lucian's True History announces more adventures to come, a pledge one early scribe called “the biggest lie of all.”³⁹ Nor are Rabelais's bookless titles the only way to generate subsidiary fictions. Where are those lines the loving Astrophil writes his Stella? They cannot be, to judge from how he describes them, the same ones printed under Philip Sidney's name. Other works gain unreality from an apparatus such as that given John Taylor's Nonsence upon Sence (1653), which identifies itself as the third part, fourth impression, fifth edition, and sixth addition, written on white paper in a brown study in the year “Millimo, Quillimo, Trillimo, Daffadillimo” (similarly, his preface to Jacke a Lent [?1617], cites page 30,000 of a work on “the Antiquitie of Ginger-bread” by one “Nymshag an ancient Utopian Philosopher”).⁴⁰

Occasionally, English writers show signs of knowing Rabelais's nonbooks, adopting or imitating them for purposes ranging from deriding individuals to the more ambiguous pleasure of inscribing nonentity or considering its pertinence to invention, referentiality, and belief. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but language—like the Chimera—can bombinate in it, if at the price of being batted around by philosophers and theologians.

The first written allusion to the library of Saint-Victor I can find is in Pierces Supererogation (1593), a diatribe Gabriel Harvey fired at Thomas Nashe in the pair's pamphlet war. Nashe's Latinisms are “junkets” and “fritters,” scoffs Harvey, that might suit the man who “compiled” the commentary De optimitate triparum (sig. Z3v).⁴¹ Harvey does not mention Rabelais, probably because elsewhere he jeers at Nashe for imitating him, but the sally works better for a reader of Pantagruel, especially one who remembers that the imagined “compiler” is fat Noël Béda—so well acquainted with tripe, so impressively swelling with his own.⁴² Happier to name Rabelais, James I recalls Rabelais's nonbooks in a letter he sent his “little beagle,” Robert Cecil, in October 1605. Yes, says the king, expenses are worrisome. And yes, ambassadors are demanding: the French (Christopher de Harlay, comte de Beaumont) “is such an insatiable epitome of avarice as I doubt not but he hath found out a new art of begging whereupon he may add a book to the bibliothèque of his countryman Rabelais.” James had a point: some weeks later John Chamberlain detailed for Dudley Carleton the envoy's successful demands for horses, plate, pictures, jewels, and sixty tuns of the Lord Treasurer's wine, which he then sold.⁴³ Nor did James shrink from citing Pantagruel; Sir Anthony Weldon, who hated the Stuarts, admitted that James had “as many ready witty jests as any man living.”⁴⁴ True, the king's two written notices of Rabelais—here and in his tirade on the “heretic” Vorstius—do come in passages voicing pique, not delight.

Quick with a jest, James could also be maladroit (his mind-boggling reading of Juno as himself, Aeneas as Bothwell, and “the rest of the gods” as Elizabeth was meant to soothe an English queen nettled by his quoting Virgil's “If I cannot prevail upon the gods, I will stir up Hell”).⁴⁵ In the letter to Cecil, the pleasantry does not work quite as well as it might. James catches one rhythm in Rabelais's library, for a number of titles begin with “On the art of” or “On the method of,” and it is true that some humiliating titles are credited to actual, dignified men. But the point of most of them is their parodic unreality. Harlay's fancied De arte mendicationis would be—as witness his own productive mooching—useful if déclassé nonfiction, even closer to the literal truth than Béda's book on tripe. James's joke is not bad, though, and it helps him graciously/defensively say to Cecil, in effect, “We both know we have money trouble; we also have read the same witty books and view with some detachment the irritating folly of others, especially foreigners.”

The year 1605 also saw Joseph Hall's Mundus alter et idem. As I have noted, its voyages to not-so-alien nations of swillers, gluttons, viragos, fools, and thieves have less of Rabelais's spirit than one might expect. Moreover, although Hall enjoys self-reference and punning names, provides such Lucianic touches as eroded monuments to give his parodic societies a specious antiquity, and places his narrator on a ship called Phantasia, Hall distrusts the imagination. Citizens of Solitaria, in the land of Fooliana, spend time “framing fictions to themselves of things never done, nor never likely to bee done: in beleeving these their fictions, and in following these beleefes: This is the reason why they abhorre company, and hate to bee interrupted in their ayrie castle-buildings.”⁴⁶ “Look who's talking,” one might object: “Your own inner Solitarians have jumped the wall and are halfway into the keep.” Yet Hall's ambivalence is typical of anti-Utopians, who fear what corrupt human desire can devise, and Utopians—like More's Hythloday—who fear the ruptures subjectivity makes in a rational social order. Nor does Hall betray Lucian in this regard, for both debunk philosophers' fantasies.

It was the translator, John Healey, whose Discovery of a New World (ca. 1609) more thoroughly enjoys a Rabelaisian breeziness, roughing up the original's Latin elegance and intensifying its interest in nonentity. That interest was hardly negligible. Hall, who had a good ear for political flatulence (he quotes an elected official as promising to “preserve us as wee were now, and make us as wee would bee”), tells how on the official's “belt of State,” gems spell out a motto that Healey translates as: “NOTHING, IF NOT BEYOND.” These are resonantly ironic words in a nowhere world, with or without an echo of the Hapsburg “Plus Ultra.” Healey, though, can push much further “beyond” Hall's “nothing”: when the latter calls his Lent-bird, RUC, huge, Healey reports that its beak is “almost” as big as “halfe the Equinoctiall circle” and in the margin explains almost by conceding that the beak's arc “wants some 359. degrees, 59. min. 60. seconds.”⁴⁷ By my calculation, and assuming that the marginal note has its figures right, this is—180 degrees. The RUC has a non-beak, if a big one.

Unlike Mundus, Discovery alludes to Rabelais, commending him in the preface (although not by name) as a wise doctor, and inventing or revising some Rabelaisian nonbooks, a satirical technique in which Hall was less interested. Healey shelves these in his margins, creating fantasy texts on the borders of a known text just as Hall's Antipodal lands sit at the borders of the known world. His titles help Healey invent fresh fantasies that both sustain the comic fiction that all this is real and let nonbeing flourish If Chimera and vacuum are valuably empty words, imaginary book titles are empty wordstrings, chimerical meta-vacuity making whole Potemkin villages of illusory discourse behind which stretch wastes of blank pages.⁴⁸ To the making of nonbook titles there need be no end, a plenitude as disconcerting as the null sets to which infinity is paradoxically akin.

Healey's fictive titles, like Rabelais's, can be indecent. Two are sexual. One comes next to a paragraph on Pye-nople, capital of Letcheritania, a region of Tenterbelly. The city is now a “poore ruined pile,” similar to Britain's Verulam, but a note remarks that Oysterpy-nople and Potato-py-nople “flourish untill this day: beeing founded by Hercules, upon his copulation with 50. women upon one night. Georg. Cap. curant. de punct. Aretinens. lib. 27” (p. 25). Whoever “Georg. Cap.” was, Hercules' nocturnal labors are mentioned by Diodorus Siculus and Pausinas. Aretino is likewise real, and whatever else punct. stands for, it must pun on the “punks” about whom he wrote so infamously. A punk joke would have point, needling the myth of Hercules' prowess and Letcheritania's reality (at least as a male hope). After all, Hercules' feat would be just another night's work for a busy punk, even if in the hero's case the results, they say, were fifty male babies who grew up to found cities in Sardinia. The implications are disturbing: Hercules founds Letcheritanian cities by spreading his seed around, but what sort of founding mothers are these? Punk(t)s? To ask why Hercules is not also a punk(t) would be feminist anachronism, but the pun does emit dissonance. The patriarch has fifty women, but under more Aretino-like circumstances one punctum—one “nothing”—could accommodate fifty Herculeses. The joke sits cheekily atop a citation of Spenser's Ruines of Time, another work on foundation and loss. Had Spenser's ruined Verulam enjoyed as much sexual vigor as Hercules, it might have survived. It may be no accident that several lines later we find the reference to the wall that has been artfully constructed of bones that is (I think) Gluttony's version of Panurge's genital bulwark against Paris's enemies. Hall exchanges obscenity for recycled leftovers, but Healey has also thought about how sex relates to urban decay.

In “Shee-landt” sex determines power, for women rule men. Dolled up and leaving the housework to the menfolk, they go dancing in taverns and play-houses. Healey writes: “Dauncing is here taken in the largest sence, including both the moderne, as galiard, pavan, Jig Etc. and the ancient, called the beginning of the world. vide Rab. Apodemat. 7. chap. 3” (p. 70). This is another nonbook, although the notion is old, most suavely expressed in John Davies' Orchestra: dancing began the world when the elements (or, if one prefers, atoms) leapt into orderly motion at Love's command. But “dancing” is also that other activity, the “olde daunce” of which Chaucer's Wife of Bath says she knows the art. I cannot guess what “Apodemat.” is an abbreviation of; the hint of “footless” (a [without] pod [foot]) might be relevant. Does the mention of “Rab.” add sexual innuendo?

Some of Healey's nonbooks laugh at gourmandise. Tenterbellian politicians prosper according to their girth, some having rounded out from thin origins in “shoppikins” at the city's edge. A note explains: “You shall find the word in Antony Mundaies discourse of the reformation of Redfaces” (p. 27). You will have to look a long time, however, although Munday was a real man who wrote many real books. Tenterbellians are not themselves great readers, their scholars studying only “Apicius his Institutions of the Arte of Muncherie” (p. 30), a real work that Healey treats with curious hesitation; perhaps he thought it was lost.⁴⁹ Their library houses ranks of “potts and kannes,” in which freshmen have “lesser measures, the sophisters [sophomores] larger, and so up to the Graduates.” An acid note adds: “We have some Universitie men that are too well read in these authors, yes verily, some study them so sore that they bring themselves of on their legs by it, saith Panurg, in his Le Tric-trac clericorum” (p. 30). Healey revises an anonymous work at Saint-Victor's, Le trictrac des Freres Frapars (The backgammon of the Belly-Bumping Brothers; Cotgrave glosses “Frere Frappart” as “a lustie, strong, tough Frier; a good boxer, a sound knocker; a notable striker, a bellie-bumper”). Healey knows that frères are clerics, but he either missed or rejected the sexual sense of Frapars.

His Rabelais can be scatological, however. One note further identifies a city in Tenterbelly: “Lickingoa is a colony, sent from Goa in the East Indies, saith Pantagruel in his Merda Geographica. lib. 7 chap. 39. Sect. 594.” Pantagruel, celebrated traveler, is evidently an authority on the Antipodes, the upside-down world, and on population shifts. But his “geography” is really “shit”—lots of it, too, if the work's seventh book alone has thirty-nine chapters and the thirty-ninth has at least 594 subsections. Nor do “Merde” and “Licking” make a happy coupling for gourmands. Healey's Rabelais is recognizably “dirty,” then—and the maker of a giant who pens nonbooks on nowheres. (Hall introduces a giant, the great All-Paunch, who ousted the indigenous population of Thrivingois, a foundational act that reverses the usual pattern; it also recalls, perhaps, how the thriving Papefigues had been conquered by the Papimanes [QL 45, the chapter with the lickers of asses' rears].)

Also scatological (if not explicitly Rabelaisian) is a book Healey invents when he tells about a choleric province of Fooliana. Every man there goes armed, even “if he goe but to my neighbour Johns.” The Oxford English Dictionary does not find john in the sense of water closet before the eighteenth century, but Healey's explanatory note must be a John [Harington]/Jakes/Ajax joke: “John Fifticankoes, Ajax his sonne and heyre, according to the pedigree drawne by Peter de qui, in his Catalogus Dunsor. Joannens. lib. 2. Cap. 17” (p. 95). This is the tone of Rabelais's library, not least in its glance at [John] Duns Scotus, the scholastic whose name unfairly gave rise to the word dunce. John has fifty “cankoes,” whatever they are. A cancro was a sore or cancer, so he may be in trouble, perhaps something like the trouble Frère Jean got into when he wiped himself with a papal decretal (QL 52). Who “Peter de qui” is, I have no idea; as a genealogist and cataloguer he resembles Rabelais.

Healey saves his deftest marginal allusion for late in the book. Stopping for a while in Theevingen, the narrator goes into the astrology business, “spying marvells in the heavens urinall as methodically as any Star-gazer” and writing “an infallible prognostication of these present times.” “Right,” says a note, “for this is but a discovery of Mundus alter et idem” (p. 131). Adroit exhibitors of nonbooks know when to hold up the real thing.⁵⁰

About the same time Healey was translating Mundus, John Donne was making a Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium (The courtier's library of rare books that are not for sale), probably finished by 1611 but not printed until 1650.⁵¹ Evelyn Simpson calls its thirty-four Latin titles “an elaborate jest in the manner of Rabelais,” although there were by now other French imaginary libraries with such satirical titles as “The Grand Chronicle of Cuckolds, Dedicated to the King of Navarre, with the Observations of the Sieur de Champvalon” (a lover of Navarre's wife, Marguerite de Valois).⁵² Rabelais is Donne's most likely model, however. Both aim at powerful men: in Donne's case these include Robert Cecil, Francis Bacon (enemy of the earl of Essex, with whom Donne sympathized), Richard Topcliffe (an inquisitor of Catholics who kept a rack at home for his convenience), and Bishop William Barlow (preacher of a sermon against Essex that, Donne thought, slavishly said what Robert Cecil told him to say). By now Donne had probably abandoned his Catholicism but not his detestation of informers, torturers, and toadies.

Donne was drawn to nullity as such. For him, Love's “art did expresse / A quintessence even from nothingnesse”; it is “re-begot / Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not,” aware that by pasting maps on a blank sphere cartographers can make its “nothing, All.”⁵³ A note, probably written in July 1604, appended to the Burley manuscript's copy of a verse letter “To Sir H[enry] W[otton] going to Venice,” adds (I have brought the superscript letters down to the line): “Sr though pchance it were nevr tryed except in Rabelais his land of tapistry it may bee true yt a pygmey upon a Giant may see further then ye giant so after a long letter this postscript may see further into yo then that if yo will answer to 2 questions whether yo have yr last despatches at court or whether yo make many dayes stay there or at London. such a one as I may yett kisse yr hand.”⁵⁴ The pygmy peering from atop a giant descends from a comment by Bernard of Chartres, but Donne relocates him to the nowhere country of Satin or Tapestry (CL 29-30).

Satinland literally embroiders the (non)facts of nature, its vegetation and animals becoming artifacts. The happy result is that fourteen phoenixes are found here, as are manticores, thirty-two unicorns, the golden fleece, the skin of Apuleius's golden ass, elephants, werewolves, Aristotle, Mid-Lent on horse-back, Triton, and a buttock-shaking beast with two backs. The price of textile living is high: the birds, we read, do not sing. Donne's pygmy-cum-giant is not perfectly suited to Satinland, being more grotesque than never-never, and the experimental note (“tryed”) might suit Quintessence's projectors more than this flat world of wonders that the narrator and crew observe but that itself seems not to do or see much of anything. Yet Donne's pleasure in the made-up is evident. “Rabelais his land of tapistry” is not unlike the Library of Saint-Victor, being a collocation of words with few referents in what we call reality. Even the narrator and Pantagruel, within the text (itself a fiction) are more real than manticores or an equestrian Mid-Lent. Maybe.

Both Rabelais's and Donne's libraries, then, record bombinations in the void. Indeed Donne has his own Chimera: Chimaeram praedicari de Antichristo autore Sorbonistâ anonymo (That Chimera is a prophecy of Anti-christ, by a nameless Sorbonnist). He, too, mocks absurd subtleties, inventing for Nicholas Hill, who believed in atoms, a De sexu et Hermaphroditate dignoscendâ in Atomis (On determining sex and hermaphroditism in atoms—a topic that seems less foolish in our age of charmed quarks and left-handed molecules). Some titles suggest skepticism, like John Dee's De navigatibitate aquarum supercoelestium, et utrum ibi an apud nos navis in firmamento in judicio sit appulsura (On the navigability of the waters above the heavens, and whether on Doomsday a ship in the firmament would dock up there or down here with us). Others, like many at Saint-Victor, are scatological: Cardanus, says Donne, has written De nullibietate crepitûs (On a fart's nowhereness), while John Harington has turned his expertise to a biblical question: Hercules, sive de modo quo evacuabatur à faecibus Arca Noae (Hercules, or How Noah's Ark was cleansed of its fecal matter). And distaste for occult triviality inspires Pico's Pythagoras Judaeo-Christianus, Numerum 99 et 66 verso folio esse eundem (The Judeo-Christian Pythagoras, or How the numbers 99 and 66 are the same if the page is reversed).

Donne is more impatient with Renaissance occultism and Platonic airiness than with late scholasticism—his philosophical butts are Europe's Picos and Dees, not its Bédas. Other differences, too, demonstrate how ironic angles of vision on emptiness and the chimerical can start from different subjectivities and cultural positions. Rabelais was not a courtier when he wrote Pantagruel, his context being more professional (and monastic) than the court world that Donne, whatever his distaste and denials, sought. Later, when he had Cardinal Du Bellay and the queen of Navarre as patrons, Rabelais was still more likely to be anti-academic, anti-papal, or antimonastic, than anti-court.

Those who navigate the straits near kings can, of course, laugh at courts, but on the whole Rabelais avoids this particular genre of satire (although Panurge can look like a scruffy courtier and Picrochole has some detestable counselors). Donne addresses elite fops and layabouts: “The mentally lazy think they know enough if they can show credibly that other people's knowledge is imperfect,” he says in the preface, but this approach may make you unpopular. At court you will have little leisure for literature, granted how late you get up and how long it takes to arrange your dress, face, gestures. Citing titles that others have not heard of, though, will give the impression that you have read much. “I have therefore jotted down for your use the following catalogue that, with these books at your elbow, you may in almost every branch of knowledge suddenly emerge as an authority, if not with deeper learning than the rest, at least with a learning differing from theirs” (pp. 39-43). Indeed so, for this “difference” (“aliter doctus”) derives precisely from naming bits of nothing, gaining authority from access to an infinite universe of possible titles. And if it is true that Donne distrusted print, then his imagining a little library of page-less books that exist only in the zodiac of his own wit is yet more significant. What is the material history of books with names but no bodies?

Yet unlike Rabelais, Donne attaches real authors to all but one of his titles. Citing these books will lend a courtier authority and the books are themselves by authorities. This difference between the two catalogues may register a shift toward authorship's increased emotional, economic, and cultural importance. Pantagruel's seventh chapter, written at first by an anagram, focuses most of its attention on the titles of trivial or foolish texts even while laughing at some flesh-and-blood people. Donne's catalogue, although not printed in his life-time, assumes a much tighter connection between the silly texts and the silly men who write them. Rabelais mocks a few actual men, like Ortwin, but in prosecuting folly Donne is more apt than Alcofribas to name names.

Francis Bacon, one of Donne's butts, had likewise been reading Rabelais in the early seventeenth century. I have noted how his Advancement of Learning (1605) appropriates passages from Gargantua on deceptive appearances and allegory. Jocular citations of Rabelais were doubtless common at a court in which the king himself, along with Jonson, Hall, Jones, Carew, Donne, and others knew his work (as did Bacon's friend John Selden, who mentions Saint Victor's library in his notes to Drayton's Poly-Olbion). It was not until the mid-1620s, though, that the former Lord Chancellor named Rabelais, several times, in printed books. Perhaps he had earlier found “Rabelais” beneath the dignity of his gravely eloquent periods and unsuited to the great work of reforming European thought. Now he felt differently, quoting Rabelais in his collection of apothegms and twice mentioning his collection of nonbooks. These latter citations show trances of self-conscious hesitation. Both simplify Rabelais's irony. Neither shows interest in nonbeing.

Bacon's De dignitate et augmentis scientarum (1623) is a Latin expansion of Advancement. Book VI, on language, addresses King James (I quote from Gilbert Wats's 1640 translation):

Certainly any man may assume the liberty (Excellent King) if he be so humourd, to jest and laugh himselfe, or his owne Projects. Who then knowes whether this worke of ours be not perchance a Transcript out of an Ancient Booke found amongst the Books of that famous Library of S. Victor, a Catalogue whereof M[aster] Fra. Rabelais hath collected? For there a Book is found entitled Formicarium Artium [The anthill of the arts]; wee have indeed accumulated a litle heape of small Dust; and laid up many Graines of Arts and Sciences therein, whereto Ants may creepe, and there repose a while, and so betake themselves to new labours.

(Sigs. Kki-Kkiv)

In the 1640 edition, but not the 1623, the margin reads “Liv.2.c.7. des faicts et dicts du bon Pantagr.”

Like a number of allusions to Rabelais, Bacon's smiling self-deprecation is a bonding gesture: he and James have read the same difficult not-very-respectable book, and although Bacon has fallen from power and been (briefly) imprisoned, he shares a discursive world with his king. The playfulness produces an odd sprezzatura. Presenting De augmentis as a hillock of dust is deliciously inappropriate, for this once singularly powerful ant and his hill of philosophy are in truth Gargantuan. Real ants are tiny, collectively organized, and unrelentingly laborious. Exactly who is doing what in Bacon's pleasantry is unclear. Bacon has made this heap by gathering grains to build a structure in a formic version of the inductive method.⁵⁵ Other ants, though, may use it as a rest stop before getting back to work. Expanding human knowledge is toil; creeping into Bacon's great Latin anthill of a book (a suggestive metaphor for the reading process) is repose.

Rabelais's point has meanwhile shifted. His anthill had connoted what is wrong with the old methods: busy, not joyful; heaped, not carpentered with number, weight, and measure; petty like Sorbonne theologians, not expansive like Pantagruel; and tunneling down, not looking up—a shrunken parody of the mount of learning on which the seven liberal arts are traditionally posed. Bacon's ants are small enough to serve his self-mockery but still admirable: the next sentence recollects how Solomon (to whom James was sometimes flatteringly compared) enjoined sluggards to learn from them. Rabelais's title is in fact disorienting: Barbara Bowen wonders whether its ants are students or professors and whether the analogy means that they scurry around aimlessly or “heap up and use their store.”⁵⁶ She does not expect an answer. Bacon's wit is disciplined and disciplinary, urging us to read and then resume labor. Especially in the early 1530s, Rabelais would have shared some of Bacon's hopes for the future of humanity, yet his greatness lies partly in his sympathy for the mind's grasshoppers as well as its ants. In any case, Bacon has signaled to a king he must have hoped would again favor him that he understands the royal wit and, while retired and aging, has stayed valuably busy.

Two years later, in the 1625 version of his essay “Of Unity in Religion,” Bacon again mentions the Library of Saint-Victor.⁵⁷ What concerns him is how Christians' self-indulgent quarreling encourages scoffing atheists: “It doth avert them from the Church, and maketh them, To sit downe in the chaire of the Scorners.” Imagining religious difference as grotesque gesture and movement, Bacon hesitantly cites Rabelais: “It is but a light Thing, to be Vouched in so Serious a Matter, but yet it expresseth well the Deformity. There is a Master of Scoffing; that in his Catalogue of Books, of a faigned Library, sets Downe this Title of a Booke; The morris daunce of Heretikes. For indeed, every Sect of them, hath a Divers Posture, or Cringe by themselves, which cannot but Move Derision, in Worldlings, and Depraved Politickes, who are apt to contemne Holy Things.”⁵⁸ Bizarre stance (literally outlandish—Morris means “Moorish”) represents mental eccentricity. Doubtless Rabelais was likewise troubled by the vain particularity and multiple imaginings that rend Christ's seamless garment. His “Morisque des Hereticques,” though, is darker than Bacon suggests, for his heretics almost certainly dance at the end of a rope, perhaps over a fire (or this is how many Rabelais scholars take the title). Has Bacon missed the ugly point? Perhaps. Rabelais scoffs, if he does scoff, at the spectacle of what power does to dissenters, not just at religious whimsy as such. If he did write the closing chapters of the Cinquième livre, after all, he gave the priestess Bacbuc wine that tastes different to different Christian palates. As so often, Rabelais is hard to pin down tonally: a Morris dance is festive, if faintly heathen, but painful for the heretics footing their way to eternity. Bacon's point is simpler: Christians should cease hopping about, doff their estranging mental costumes, and agree on the basics.

Thomas Browne would have liked Bacbuc's wine, for more than Bacon he wanted to live and let live in matters of belief. In Religio medici (1635), right after the remark that the fables of “Garagantua” are no more incredible than certain parts of Scripture, he lists religious puzzles that he insists do not test his own faith (but that he is evidently willing to publish). Fussing with them is not worth our time: there are a “bundle” of topics inviting oversubtle prying into mystery, “not only in Philosophy, but in Divinity” that although “proposed and discussed by men of most supposed abilities” are “not worthy our vacant hours, much less our serious Studies. Pieces only fit to be placed in Pantagruell's Library, or bound up with Tartaretus De modo Cacandi [How to shit]” (p. 30). The margin says “In Rabelais, a french author.” Browne sends “curiosity” and logical niceties to languish in comic nonbeing.

Like Rabelais, he somatizes that nonbeing: scholastic pickiness is both irrelevant and excremental, for “Tartaretus” suggests Tateret, a real theologian and commentator on Aristotle with a name all too like tarter, slang for visiting the privy. The book's title implies what academics and philosophers really produce—the printing house is the outhouse. Even imaginary shit is ambiguous, though, because scatology brings abstractions down to earth (compare Swift's more-than-Rabelaisian Gulliver's Travels). As the “curious” scribble away they extrude mere excrement, yet in fact they should keep such fundamental matter in mind, rectifying their sense of the embodied human condition. Poor Tartaretus/Tateret/Tartarus is not content to do what comes naturally. Neither can those who are too proud to trust Scripture, whatever its occasional Gargantuan absurdities. In a happy pun the ambiguity extends to Browne's phrasing, for the problems he “places” in Rabelais's library are “bound up” with a book on defecation: such texts are both dung and constipation.⁵⁹

At some point Browne made his own fantasy library, lodging it in his imagined Musaeum Clausum near such curiosa as extract of cuttlefish-ink (a cure for hysteria) and a picture of Oedipus hearing what he had done to his parents.⁶⁰Musaeum is less satirical than Rabelais's library, more nostalgic, a fancied balm for scholarly pain at what time and chance have done to history's record. It houses, for example, “A punctual relation of Hannibal's march out of Spain into Italy, and far more particular than that of Livy, where about he passed the River Rhodanus … what Vinegar he used, and where he obtained such quantity to break and calcine the Rocks made hot with fire”; a commentary on Hanno the Carthaginian's account of his trip along the African coast; Seneca's letters to Saint Paul; and “A Commentary of Galen upon the Plague of Athens described by Thucydides.” The titles are lost or fictitious but they were or might have been real, and Browne's deeper fantasy is that what should have been, or once was, in fact is or might be. Rabelais finds many ways to package absurdity and nothingness; Browne imagines repairing absence and loss, pulling buzzing Chimera back to safety from her vacuum. Logocentric metaphysicians and Petrarchan lovers are not alone in aching for presence. Graphocentric bibliophiles want it too.

Notes

1. Michael Drayton, Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie, in Drayton, Works, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and B. H. Newdigate (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1961) III, 125; Drayton writes of “Dowsabell” in his fourth eclogue. On rhyparography, see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); her chapter on Rabelais quotes CL prol. on the author as a “petit riparographe.”

2. Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), explores James's support of festivity under attack by strict-minded moralists. Jonson, she argues, had a mixed reaction to James's “delight in the carnival grotesquerie of traditional pastimes” (12). Peter Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), likewise thinks that the Jonsonian masque shows ambivalence toward the wonderful. For a longer version of this section see my “The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel's Dreams,” ELH 51 (1984), 407-30.

3. On sources, see Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), I, 43-44.

4. On authorship and sources, see the edition by Jean Porcher of the Songes drolatique (Paris: E. Losfeld, 1959). Songes was imitated in a 1598 book published at Augsberg (Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Réveils et prodigues: Le Gothique fantastique [Paris: A. Colin, 1960], 304). I reprint here illustrations from the facsimile by Edwin Tross (Paris: 1870). Michel Jeanneret's facsimile edition of Songes (La Chaux-de-fonds: Editions [vwa], 1989) notes the images' ties to decoration and teratology.

5. “Tresexcellent, mirificque Pantagruel: homme jadis tres-renommé à cause de ses faicts heroiques, comme les histoires tresplusque veritables en font des discours admirables … et ne croy point que Panurge en ait jamais veu ne cogneu de plus admirables en pays où il a faict n’agueres ses dernieres navigations.”

6. In his edition of Divils Charter (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1904), R. B. McKerrow does not mention the Songes. I cannot identify Pantaconger or Mandragon.

7. In act III, scene ii, Frescobaldi boasts of his lineage, and Barnes's devil equivocates Jesuitically. Jaqueline E. M. Latham, “Machiavelli, Policy, and The Devil's Charter,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984), 97-108, claims that Barnes lacks Macbeth's sense of “metaphysical or spiritual reality”; yet he raises similar issues.

8. John Webster, The White Devil, ed. F. L. Lucas (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 196. See also Songes (SD) 99. A.-F. Bourgeois, “Rabelais en Angleterre,” RER 3 (1905), 80-83 notes the connection.

9. Lucas takes “linguist” as “master of language,” not “polyglot,” for “the Tempter” has “a persuasive tongue.” But Satan, running a multinational business, must be multilingual.

10. Orgel, in Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 486; see ll. 33-34, 39-40, 49-106.

11. SD 29 has wings; for more honey see SD 7 and 84. Bruegel's Superbia has a similar sting figure and a vaguely similar beehive; Desprez unites them in one figure, Jonson in one line. See Louis Lebeer, Catalogue raisonné des estampes de Bruegel l’ancien (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, 1969).

12. SD 44: a creature tasting the contents of his steaming body/pot; SD 42: a barrel-bodied funnel-headed creature with what looks like a kitchen knife; and SD 128: a barrel-creature with cup, pitcher, and flaccid breasts, surrounded by small, frogoid animals. SD 22 and 97 are likewise culinary.

13. Utopian is Pantagruel's tongue. I read piece as “artillery” (Oxford English Dictionary) and conclusion as punning on “tail.” Cf. John Taylor's To the Honour of O Toole (1622): “And all men know that never such an od piece / Of fighting mettle, sprung from Mars his Codpiece” (1630; Taylor, Works [Spenser Society 1869; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1967], 177).

14. I read pudding as intestines and not, like Orgel, as the phallus.

15. Orgel links the windmill to gluttony's grinding of food, noting a windmill-head in Bruegel's Gula. Windmill also meant a pinwheel, sometimes indicating “a fanciful notion, a crochet” (Oxford English Dictionary). SD 95 wears one on his head.

16. Desprez's boot, but not the figure, is from Bruegel's Invidia.

17. SD 105 also has a bell. I include SD 96, although it is not clearly a barber or lawyer. In P 3 a woman has “visage de rebec,” which Huntington Brown (Rabelais in English Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1967], 210) thinks is echoed by Shakespeare (Love's Labor's Lost, V.ii) when Boyet calls Holofernes “A cittern-head.” True, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that citherns often had a grotesquely carved heads, citing several such comparisons.

18. Songes has no Kentishmen (long rumored, if only as a joke, to have tails), but SD 39 is a cheerful simian fisherman with an impressive tail.

19. Davenant and Jones, Luminalia, in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, II, 706ff.

20. On such figures, see D. J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 179-84.

21. Orgel and Strong give the account by a Venetian diplomat (Inigo Jones, I, 279-84).

22. Ben Jonson, For the Honor of Wales, in Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, ll. 182-83, 295-98.

23. On Neptune's opening, see Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 91-97.

24. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, II, 380-81.

25. Faire Maide of the Inn, in John Webster, Complete Works, ed. F. L. Lucas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), IV; see IV.ii.172-79 (SD 67 and 87 show grotesque frogs). Nor are Webster's and Jonson's olla podridas that year's only Spanish stews. William Crosse's Belgiaes Troubles and Triumphs (1625) claims that Spaniards are “Bigge lookers in their high Castillian ruffes, / But meere Quixotes, Rodomantading braves”; “full of emptinesse,” they are a mere “Hotch-Potch” of Spanish, Portuguese, “salvage” and Moor (sig. I4).

26. James Shirley, The Triumph of Peace, ed. Clifford Leech, in A Book of Masques (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, repr. 1970), 275-313, ll. 188-89. A.-F. Bourgeois, RER 9 (1911), 171-72, first noted a connection with SD.

27. T. J. B. Spencer, introduction to William Davenant's Salmacida Spolia, in A Book of Masques, p. 339. I cite line numbers.

28. See Edgar Wind, Giorgione's Tempestà (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), on tempests; for Davenant on his title, see A Book of Masques, 348-49.

29. Virginia Bush, The Colossal Sculpture of the Cinquecento (New York: Garland, 1976), p. 293 and fig. 321.

30. On this “herméneutique cannibale,” see Frank Lestringant, “Catholiques et cannibales: Le Thème du cannibalisme dans le discours protestant au temps des guerres de religion,” in J.-C. Margolin and Robert Sauzet, eds., Pratiques et discours alimentaires à la Renaissance (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982), 233-35. Although he ignores giants, Lestringant notes a fear of primitive rawness (a “retour au cru”).

31. Such writers presuppose the old distinction between eikastic images that feed the active intelligence and phantastic images that delude it. Distrust of fantasy persists. In a provocative essay using Bakhtin on carnival and Tsetvan Todorov on fantasy, Deborah N. Losse calls the two modes incompatible, for fantasy assumes a supernatural and medieval “vertical and hierarchical … time-space.” It “divert[s] our attention from the focus of Rabelais's fictional universe—man himself, the proper domain of the carnival” (“Rabelaisian Paradox: Where the Fantastic and the Carnivalesque Intersect,” Romanic Review 77 [1986], 322-29). This seems Puritanical. In practice and in Rabelais, carnival and fantasy are less readily distinguishable.

32. Thomas Browne, Religio medici, in Browne, Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1928-31) I, 28-29, using the 1682 edition. Browne wrote in 1635; there was an unauthorized edition in 1642.

33. Thomas Browne, Pseudoxia epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), I, 601; cf. G 4-5, 38.

34. The people who dominated English court life would not have found Genevan culture likeable.

35. Gale H. Carrithers, Jr., “City-Comedy's Sardonic Hierarchy of Literacy,” SEL 29 (1989), 337-55, shows how such plays drew class lines by dramatizing degrees of literacy; what “distinguishes the big winners from the big losers is superior facility with texts” (350). Plotwell, a good panurge, quotes a text that his apparently monolingual hearers cannot recognize.

36. See Fred J. Nichols's beguilding “Generating the Unwritten Text: The Case of Rabelais,” L’Esprit créateur 28 (1988), 7-17.

37. François Moreau, “La Bibliothèque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor,” Littératures 19 (1988), 37-42, notes the lack of Bibles in this list.

38. Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and the Library of Saint-Victor,” in Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for Donald A. Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1991), 159-70, examines this title; she notes that Ortwin in fact had humanist credentials, angering von Hutten and his collaborators more by his bias against Jewish books than by his ignorance as such.

39. Lionel Casson, Selected Satires of Lucian (New York: Norton, 1968), 57.

40. John Taylor, Jacke a Lent, in Taylor, Works, fourth collection (Spenser Society 21, 1877), sig. A1. Nicholas Breton's Strange Newes out of Divers Countries (1622) reports titles (Presidents of Imperfections, Newes of No Importance, and Labour in Vaine) and gives précis. One concerns the city of Nullibi, where a student “labour[s] much to bring all to nothing”; cf CL 21.

41. A liminary poem in French by Lawrence Whitaker for Thomas Coryat's Coryats Crudities (1611) mentions the same volume in a kindlier spirit, saying Crudities might fit, retitled in new giant words, between the tripe commentary—here ascribed to “Tirepetanus” (Fart-Drawer)—and Marmoretus on monkeys.

42. Barbara C. Bowen notes that the title suggests both the tripe that people (especially peasants) eat and the tripe inside Béda; see “Les Géants et la nature des tripes,” ER 31 (1996), 65-73.

43. Letters of King James VI and I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 269-70 (a note cites Chamberlain); The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), I, 213-15.

44. Quoted in James I by His Contemporaries, ed. Robert Ashton (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 14; Weldon died in 1648. James read jestbooks, alluding to Scoggin in a 1591 letter to James Maitland (Letters of King James VI and I, 113). He names a speaker in his Daemonologie (1597) Epistemon, perhaps thinking of Pantagruel's friend.

45. Letters of King James VI and I, 130 (April 13, 1594), 132-33 (June 5, 1594).

46. Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem, trans. John Healey as Another World and Yet the Same (Mundus Alter et Idem), ed. Huntington Brown (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), 91. Hall directs his satire more at phantasm-generating melancholy.

47. Hall, Mundus alter et idem, trans. Healey, 42, 41, 37.

48. On chimera and vacuum as “empty names” that are useful in logic, see Desmond Paul Henry, That Most Subtle Question (Quaestio Subtilissima): The Metaphysical Bearing of Medieval and Contemporary Linguistic Disciplines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 1-3.

49. De re coquinaria, misattributed to the Augustan Apicius, contains recipes for dormice and other delicacies. Healey's note: “For some such bookes he wrote, witness Suidas.”

50. Page 134 mentions a “History of Mercury (a booke unknowne to us)” that the locals consider “as holy as the Turkes do their Alcoran.”

51. John Donne, Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium, ed. Evelyn Simpson, trans. Percy Simpson (London: Nonesuch, 1930). I use Simpson's translation throughout. The books are not for sale for obvious reasons, but “non vendibilium” may also connect to Donne's ambivalence toward print. Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 185-86, 191-92, sees Catalogus as evidence that Donne still distrusted courts and power.

52. In the Library of Madame de Montpensier; on which book, see J. H. M. Salmon, “French Satire in the Late Sixteenth Century,” SCJ 3 (1975), 57-88.

53. John Donne, “A Nocturnall” (recalling CL's Quintessence, whose servants manipulate nothing) and “A Valediction of Weeping.”

54. Printed with other notes and letter in Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 319-20.

55. A nice point that was once made to me by Annabel Patterson.

56. Bowen, “Library,” 169, quoting Bacon's Novum organum, I, 95.

57. Francis Bacon, “Of Unity in Religion,” in Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 12. Kenneth A. Hovey, “‘Mountaigny Saith Prettily’: Bacon's French and the Essay,” PMLA 106 (1991), 71-82, shows the increased presence of France, and its supposed flaws, in the 1612 and 1625 editions. For Bacon, he says (80), “Rabelais is in the end only ‘a Master of Scoffing.’” This is the impression Bacon gives when discussing high matters; his borrowings from Gargantua betray a deeper engagement.

58. “Master of Scoffing” has an academic flavor: Rabelais is a magister. The 1638 Latin translation misses this point, “Insignis quidam Jocandi Artifex” (sig. O8v) demotes him from magister to craftsman; the title is now Saltationes florales, et gesticulationes haeriticorum.

59. Imaginary libraries stayed popular. Paul Lacroix, Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victoir (Paris: Techener, 1862), lists many French ones. See also The Fanatick Library: Being a Catalogue of Such Books as Have Been Lately Made, and, by the Authors, Presented to the College of Bedlam (1660), a sneer at the defunct Commonwealth. It includes: The Rump's Seminary: or, The Way to Find out the Ablest Utopian Commonwealth's Men; Lucri bonus est odor ex re quâlibet, “a Treatise written in defence of the seizing on the boy's Close-stool Pan, and reserving the contents for his own profit, because the lad was so profane as to carry it on a Sunday. By Alderman Atkins, Shitbreeches,” and The Defect of a Virtue Is Worse Than the Excess, “a Treatise showing how much better it is to be hung like a stallion with Henry Martin, than with the lord Mounson to want a bauble” (Harleian Miscellany VIII, 71-73).

60. Musaeum Clausum, in Browne, Works, V, 131-42.

Abbreviations

BHR: Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance

CA: Croniques admirables

CL: Cinquième livre (1564)

CLS: Comparative Literature Studies

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

G: Gargantua (1534 or 1535)

ELR: English Literary Renaissance

ER: Etudes rabelaisiennes

HLQ: Huntington Library Quarterly

JEGP: Journal of English and German Philology

JMRS: Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Jourda: François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierra Jourda (Paris: Garnier, 1962)

MLR: Modern Language Review

MP: Modern Philology

MRTS: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies

NRB: Stephen Rawles and M. A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais Before 1626 (Geneva: Droz, 1987; ER 20)

P: Pantagruel (1532)

Plan: Pierre-Paul Plan, Les Editions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904).

PQ: Philological Quarterly

QL: Quart livre (1552)

R&R: Renaissance and Reformation

RenQ: Renaissance Quarterly

RER: Revue des études rabelaisiennes

RES: Review of English Studies

RHR: Réforme, humanisme, renaissance

SCJ: Sixteenth Century Journal

SEL: Studies in English Literature

SP: Studies in Philology

TL: Tiers livre (1546)