SOURCE: “Change and Exchange,” in Rabelais Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 1-22.

[In the excerpt below, Zegura and Tetel discuss the importance of change and economics in Rabelais's life and works, arguing that these two concepts hold the key for comprehending his disjointed writings.]

François Rabelais hawked his Third Book (1546) by claiming the text would never run dry. “Our barrel will prove inexhaustible,” he tells us, comparing his book to a bottomless cask of wine that is “lively at the source and of perpetual flow … a veritable cornucopia of merriment and mockery” (TB, Prol., 298-99).¹ That the prognostication holds true today, not just for the Third Book but for the entire Rabelaisian text, is a tribute to the good doctor's special brand of alchemy, which within the crucible of the fiction combines ingredients so diverse that they never stop interacting. To catalog this hodgepodge of ingredients, which we often label macaronic, would be to catalog the Renaissance itself, a syncretic period of socioeconomic and intellectual ferment that was afloat with heterogeneous philosophies and cultural manifestations. In both the text and the world it represents, humanism is coeval with Scholasticism, a regressive fascination with origins is counterbalanced by progressive attempts at originality, Platonism and Aristotelianism coexist with witchcraft and necromancy, and utopian treatises advocating shared values and property are inscribed against a backdrop of petty tyranny, theft, and vandalism.

The result is a rich but volatile admixture of contraries that yields new complexities with each successive taste, as signifiers recombine like atomic particles in new molecular configurations. No reading is ever quite identical to its predecessor, for instead of ironing out semantic wrinkles and reducing the play of signifiers, each taste and each aftertaste from the “cornucopian text” at once challenges our old interpretive paradigms and restructures our image of the author.²

THE TEXTUAL ENIGMA

Five centuries after his birth, the “real” Rabelais still eludes us. Instead he remains what he has always been: a tantalizing enigma, a puzzle whose pieces do not quite fit. Moreover, among the readings that have been proposed through the years, some provisionally and others positivistically and reductively, there is little consensus. Indeed, our interpretations taken collectively are as contradictory and often as puzzling as the Pantagrueline Tales themselves. Gilbert Ducher, known as Vulton (1538), hailed his fellow humanist as the “supreme master” of Renaissance letters; Pierre Boulanger (1587) marveled at his “refined genius”; and Anatole France (1889) called him “the miracle of the sixteenth century.” In his Théotimus (1549), however, Gabriel du Puy Herbault labeled Rabelais “an impure and corrupt man” possessing the gift of gab but very little common sense, and John Calvin (1555) placed Maître François among the lowly ranks of “mad dogs” whose literary output is garbage.³

Clearly the slurs upon Rabelais by Calvin and du Puy Herbault must be taken with a grain of salt: functioning first and foremost as religious polemic, they constitute return volleys in a rhetorical battle between Rabelais, the Calvinists, and the Sorbonne during an era of profound upheaval in the Church. As any teacher of Rabelais knows, however, the basic negativism of both Calvin and du Puy Herbault finds adherents even today. Counterbalancing the aficionados who find Rabelais sublime, a Gargantuan artist rivaling Shakespeare in his use of language and the breadth of his inspiration, are detractors so antagonized by his ebullient scatology that they consider him a second-rate pornographic writer. For all those who see in him the embodiment of Renaissance reason, which exuberantly challenged the medieval episteme with its normative values and closed corpus of knowledge, there are detractors who deplore his exploration of madness and his nonsensical breaches of logic. Depending upon the metatext one reads, Rabelais may be labeled feminist or antifeminist, atheistic or evangelistic, profoundly original or a plagiarist of the worst sort.

What emerges from this fractured spectrum of readings is a profoundly dichotomous Rabelais, whose emblem might well be the two-colored man of the Third Book prologue (TB, Prol., 297), or Gargantua's two-headed androgyne (G, VIII, 28), or even the reversible Silenus box (G, Prol., 3-4), which turns into its opposite when examined closely. Even for his contemporaries, the object of this controversy was not so much Rabelais the man, an eminent physician and classicist, as the corpus of his fictional writing: Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1534), the Third Book (1546), the Fourth Book (1552), and a partially finished Fifth Book, the disputed origins of which have fueled the controversy surrounding Rabelais.⁴ As for the four authenticated books, which revolve around the adventures of Gallic giants who double as Renaissance men, they are a brilliant but disjointed combination of lists, enigmas, epic feats, burlesque comedy, topical satire, fantasy, folklore, philosophy, pedagogy, theology, and scatology, all grafted onto the Gargantua legend. Almost impossible to classify generically, this magnum opus yields glimpses of a Rabelais who is by turns pious and irreverent, earthy and refined, regressively misogynist and progressively androgynous.

All literature is ultimately ambiguous, to be sure, owing to the inherently double or plural nature of figurative language and discourse. We as readers further fragment textuality with the biases, sensitivities, and expectations we bring to the reading experience. Even given these caveats, however, antinomies and unresolved enigmas are so prevalent in Rabelais that they arguably constitute the substantificque mouelle or “marrow” of his fiction. Admittedly a good number of the loose ends that puzzle readers today are learned puns and inside jokes to be deciphered by Rabelais's fellow humanists, enamored of Platonic duality and allegory, who delighted in intellectual games.⁵ Similarly, Rabelais's penchant for contradiction can be partially explained as a function of the pro and contra logic of Scholastic reasoning, which still prevailed at the Sorbonne during Rabelais's lifetime, and his abrupt shifts from high to low style have been convincingly linked to the upside-down worlds of carnival and the feast of fools, where aristocrats were mocked and idiots venerated.⁶ While each of these historical insights adds immeasurably to our appreciation of particular facets of Rabelais's writing, none comes close to accounting for the massive depth and breadth of polyvalence in the Pantagrueline Tales. Given the conjunction between these textual bipolarities and those in the culture at large, it seems likely that the systemic all-prevasiveness of Rabelais's ambiguity reflects the divided consciousness of an era in transition.

If it is difficult to pin Rabelais down, it is because he is never stationary. His world, both fictional and historical, is dominated by the forces of change. Aside from the minimal amount of sleep they require, the giants populating Rabelais's fiction, who owe their stature to an inherited mutation, are constantly on the move: eating, growing, studying, reproducing, inventing, playing, traveling, defecating, asking questions, working, and warring. In typical Renaissance fashion, even the education of the heroes is predominantly peripatetic, taking them outside the classroom to fields and meadows in the Gargantua, to neighboring university towns in the Pantagruel, to experts from multiple disciplines in the Third Book, and to a series of foreign countries in the Fourth Book.

At the beginning of Pantagruel, this movement seems overwhelmingly progressive: in his celebrated letter (P, VIII), Gargantua places his son's education and growth under the hubristic emblem of humanistic advances, the much-heralded transition from darkness to light that is a commonplace of Renaissance writing. Further reading, however, reveals that Rabelais's world is not only expanding diachronically; on a synchronic level, it also gyrates wildly on its axis, rather like the cyclical wheel of fortune and reversible world upside down that inform so much of the Rabelaisian text. This is because change permeates not just the themes and action but also the discourse itself of Rabelais's novel. The narrator is shifty, the logic dialectical, the discursive mode dialogic, and the language ambiguous, filled with plays upon words and multiple entendres that leave the reader vacillating between two or more interpretations.⁷

Far from gratuitous, the protean instability of Rabelais's narrative is in large measure a function of exchange, which denotes the substitution or trade of one thing for another within contexts as diverse as linguistics and finance. While Rabelais uses the word “exchange” or “eschange” only twice, as a reference to the transition from life to death (OC, TB, Prol., 326; FB, Prol., 524), the structure itself permeates the entire Rabelaisian text.⁸ The prologue of the Pantagruel catapults us into a wheeling-and-dealing marketplace where values fluctuate and goods change hands constantly, and while the peddler's caravan remains curtained thereafter, the first book's commercial framework provides a unifying backdrop to the Pantagrueline Tales. Coins and currency such as ecuz and caroluz flow almost as freely as linguistic tokens on the pages of Rabelais's text, which is liberally punctuated with references to money, profit, buying, selling, and financial transactions in general.⁹ Inherently dialectic by virtue of their commerce with otherness, these monetary transactions are often the locus of paradox and ambiguity, which act to further destabilize the Renaissance epic's inherently shaky value system. Panurge's charitable contributions in chapter 17 of Pantagruel prove to be a screen for theft, and the same character's “Praise of Debt,” which he justifies as a form of caritas and cooperation, is one of the most famous paradoxes of all literature. In a slightly different vein, Panurge's confusion of the golden bough, a spiritual token used by Aeneas to gain entrance to the underworld, and caroluz or “golden coins” (TB, XVII, 354), adds to the deterioration of an already eroded value system by suggesting that rewards in the new world of the Renaissance go not to the worthiest knight but rather to the highest bidder and craftiest bargainer.

Here and in the Frozen Words episode (FB, LVI, 650), where Panurge talks of “selling” language, it becomes clear that financial references are both a theme in their own right, reflective of the inflationary times, and a metonym of exchange in general, which in Rabelais comprises borrowing from the ancients, attempts at commerce with the supernatural, linguistic exchange, the economy of salvation, symbolic substitutions, and trade with other cultures. These processes are so prevalent in the Pantagrueline Tales that one may view the entire saga as an anatomy of exchange, an inquest into its laws and its limitations. In the Gargantua, the head-on encounter of two radically different systems of agricultural exchange precipitates the entire Picrocholine War, which itself finds resolution in the utopian Abbey of Thélème, a model of perfect reciprocity. The Third Book, which chronicles Panurge's quandary over whether or not to marry, combines a debate on the merits of commerce with alterity with an inquest on the limits of intellectual commerce, and the Fourth Book, which advances by means of a sea voyage, extends the first prologue theme of marketing to the level of intercultural commerce.

Not just the plot but microunits of the text as well form variations on the theme of exchange. Such episodes as Badebec's death, Gargantua's letter on learning, the court case of Kissarse and Bumfondle, Epistemon's hell, Gargantua's color symbolism, and “The Praise of the Pantagruelion” feed into the epic's vast network of exchange. Though many of these episodes contain no mention of money, they are articulated in terms and patterns consistent with the original financial metonym. Within the Pantagrueline Tales, both linguistic and financial exchange are marred by inflation, devaluation, two-sided tokens, middlemen, and the specter of profit.

The felicitous conjunction of economic theory and linguistic terminology, which refers to words as tokens, helps us appreciate the relationship between Rabelais's original financial metonym and other exchange networks within the saga. The analogy between words and money is far from anachronistic, for economics and monetary theory appear as subsets of semiotics and linguistic theory throughout the Middle Ages, and attempts to enrich the French language and literary style in the sixteenth century are often couched in monetary terms. In his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), for example, Joachim du Bellay urges the French to pillage “without conscience” the wealth of ancient languages, and the correspondence between the two humanistic giants Guillaume Budé and Erasmus is dense with economic signifiers used as financial, stylistic, and epistemological referents.¹⁰ To read and write, for the dean of French humanists and his illustrious Flemish counterpart, is both to “pillage libraries” (98) and to “spend” (56) one's intellect upon literary “treasures” (64, 67) that are “profitable” (74). Taken together, these and similar examples suggest that Rabelais fully intends his financial references, and even the market backdrop of his first prologue, to reflect on and function as signifiers within his epistemological and linguistic quest.

Because of its traditional prominence in the debate between nominalists and realists, and because of the gap between its absolute and relative value in the Renaissance, money is particularly well adapted to help figure the crisis of signification outlined in Rabelais. Coins themselves were viewed by economic realists in the early feudal era as verbal symbols whose face value corresponded perfectly to the quantity and quality of substance contained within them.¹¹ With the advent of economic nominalism in the later Middle Ages, however, “money came to constitute a mobile measure,” and there occurred a “gradual loosening of the relation between the face value and the metallic value of coins.”¹² As coins and paper notes proliferated in the sixteenth century, their value decreased, prompting Jean Bodin to speculate in 1568 that fluctuations in monetary value were a function of abundance versus rarity, and that the depreciation of French currency could be directly linked to its profusion.

Because of the similarity between the floating of monetary values and Rabelais's own floating of linguistic signifiers, both articulated in opposition to an immovable ideal, it seems likely that the author is consciously inscribing his financial subtext within a broader meditation on the problematics of signification in the absence of symbolic transparency. Structurally, moreover, the two-sided physical configuration of the verbal and monetary tokens in which the narrator-barker-alchemist traffics effectively emblematizes the binary configuration of the Rabelaisian text. And at the same time, on a thematic level, money's pejorative connotations as a fallen symbol and as an object of postlapsarian cupiditas provide a vehicle for the author's critique of greed, which he both contrasts with the unselfish prelapsarian ideal of caritas and links subversively with the economics of excess or hubris underlying the Renaissance voyages of discovery.

CHANGING TIMES AND PATTERNS OF EXCHANGE

In addition to being consistent with preexisting literary and philosophical models and imbued with internal logic, the exchange-oriented cast of Rabelais's fiction has roots in his life and times. Like the Pantagrueline Tales, Rabelais's biography is a string of enigmas, inconsistencies, migrations, and transmutations played out against a background of intellectual, social, and financial ferment, which was characteristic of the sixteenth century. While our knowledge of Rabelais's early years is sketchy, we do know that he was one of three surviving children born to the lawyer Antoine Rabelais toward the end of the fifteenth century in the region of Chinon in west central France.

His precise date of birth is uncertain, but two provisional time frames are in circulation. A manuscript of epitaphs, found in Saint Paul's Church in Paris and probably dating from the eighteenth century, indicates that Rabelais was 70 at the time of his death in 1553, which would place his date of birth in 1483. Yet in a letter dated 1521 to Guillaume Budé, Rabelais's own claim to be an adulescens, a Latin term designating the period between 14 and 28 years, has resulted in the wide acceptance of 1494 as an alternative birthdate. The major flaw in this appealing hypothesis, which would make Rabelais 38 instead of 49 when he penned his first novel, is the fact that adulescens is occasionally used figuratively by humanists, denoting a period of literary apprenticeship unrelated to biological age. Given Budé's fame as an intellectual in 1521, it is entirely plausible that an obscure Franciscan monk, newly enamored of classicizing studies, would consider himself an “adolescent” in comparison with the father of French humanism. Like the elusive “meaning” of his epic, then, Rabelais's birthdate has become a puzzle of textuality, contingent upon the accuracy of an unknown scribe and the value of a two-sided linguistic token.

While knowing the exact date of Rabelais's birth is appealing, it is less crucial to our understanding of his text than is our grasp of the century between 1453 and 1553, the year of Rabelais's death. Like our own era, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of radical and widespread changes in such varied areas as art, politics, religion, geography, astronomy, jurisprudence, technology, and economics. On an international level, 1453 marks the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, effectively ending medieval Christendom's efforts to occupy the Holy Land. Not only the outcome but the nature of the conflict proved decisive, for the Turks’ use of artillery and massive cannonballs broke radically with the one-on-one combat of chivalry and its emphasis upon personal honor.

On the domestic front, 1453 also marks the end of the Hundred Years War, which together with the plague and recurring famines decimated France's population and paralyzed its economy during the late Middle Ages. The decades immediately following the decisive battle of Castillon were characterized by an intense rebuilding effort, which may well have inspired Rabelais's preoccupation with growth, procreation, productivity, and trade. Demographic data for the period are limited, but growth curves in a number of towns suggest that the population of France increased by at least half during the century following the war with England.¹³ Forests that had grown up untended during the war, such as that in the sixteenth chapter of Gargantua, were razed to make way for new farmland, and agricultural productivity leapt forward to keep pace with the population explosion. This increased demand for produce also contributed to a general rise in agricultural prices and profits, allowing newly affluent landowners to purchase luxury items that in turn boosted trade and urban production. Though this upward economic spiral was to become inflationary as early as the 1530s, a phenomenon due in part to the excess bullion imported from central Europe and the Americas, it is fair to say that the initial economic surge brought a visible degree of prosperity to late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century France.

By using this newfound wealth to promote scholarship, renovate castles, upgrade the arts, and amass books, King Francis I (1515-47) generally succeeded in wresting France out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, but the route toward modernization and enlightenment was not without its underside. France ultimately failed in its military effort to annex Milan and Naples, and the decades of war, primarily against Emperor Charles V, badly depleted the French treasury, which was simultaneously being drained by the court's newly acquired taste for luxury. Despite the country's increased productivity, moreover, there is some indication that this surface prosperity was not fully shared by the peasantry, which was observed in 1517 to be “more oppressed than dogs or slaves.”¹⁴ For scholars and writers, moreover, the climate of religious tolerance and intellectual openness fostered by Francis I during the first decades of his reign was resisted at every step by the conservative Sorbonne and Parlement, which banned the study of Greek, condemned freethinkers as heretics, and ordered that a number of suspected Reformers be burned at the stake. Following the Affaire des Placards in 1534, a massive demonstration against the papal mass that was more or less contemporaneous with the publication of Rabelais's Gargantua, even the liberal Francis joined in the crackdown on dissidents, perhaps sensing that intellectual ferment was fast becoming religious schism. Despite the reinstitution of the inquisitional Chambre Ardente in 1547 by his son and successor. Henry II, the tide of change could not be stemmed, and less than a decade after Rabelais's death, the nation was embroiled in a bloody and devastating civil war that in the end, 30 years later, would leave only the ashes of France's burgeoning golden age.

Many of the changes that helped define the Renaissance were fueled in part by exchange with Italy, a country that first captured the imagination of French soldiers during the peninsular campaigns of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The gilded ceilings, bright sensual paintings, silken garments, bubbling fountains, and voluptuous sculptures of the Italian courts left an indelible impression upon the Frenchmen who accompanied Charles VIII and his successors in their assault upon Naples and Milan. Accustomed to more spartan fare, the northerners eagerly embraced the land of Petrarch and Botticelli, whose luminous esthetic achievements camouflaged a profound ethical and epistemological crisis.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, perhaps as a result of intellectual ferment at the court of Avignon, Italian artists and philosophers rediscovered pagan antiquity and began to break loose from the restrictive confines of ecclesiastical dogma, which for centuries had dominated medieval art and scholarship.¹⁵ The result was a dynamic era of “rebirth” that informed the thought of Rabelais 150 years later. In the graphic arts, vitality and movement returned to representations of the human body. Freed from their Christian interpretations, classical texts also opened up a rich variety of behavioral and cognitive models that at once enriched and destabilized the decision-making processes and value systems of Renaissance humanists. Whereas the late-medieval Dante could still reconcile divine and terrestrial love in a single figure, the humanist Petrarch vacillated erratically between the two poles, and Boccaccio changed the short exemplum with its clear-cut moral into a complex tapestry of relative values and situational ethics. This legacy of moral and epistemological polyvalence, a problematic byproduct of cultural rebirth, permeates the Rabelaisian text even more radically than it does the texts of Rabelais's Italian ancestors.

In Italy as in France, this profoundly altered outlook on life was not entirely literary in origin. Instead, it was fueled by changing patterns of financial as well as intellectual exchange. As fiefs disintegrated, the increasing migration of peasants from rural farmlands to dense urban centers, the growth of an ever more powerful middle class, and the evolution from local to national and international markets contributed to the substitution of pragmatic values for medieval and feudal idealism. For scholars, renewed contact with antiquity represented an equally important form of commerce that served to cross-pollinate previously homogeneous values. While this grafting of pagan borrowings onto fundamentally Christian texts is generally labeled “syncretic,” a term denoting the absence of discord between pluralistic credos, the polysemous system of borrowing that Rabelais inherited from Italy necessarily contributes to the ambiguity of his text. True, the syncretic potpourri of ideas placed in circulation by Italian and French humanists was in the main neither atheistic nor anti-Christian. Although they strayed from the narrow confines of Catholic dogma, philosophers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino were ultimately seeking to reconcile their own religion and pagan antiquity in a new synthesis. Inevitably, however, the antitheses inherent in this attempted synthesis attracted satirists such as Luigi Pulci, Teofilo Folengo, and Ludovico Ariosto, whose irreverent mock epics poking fun at chivalry elicited charges of impiety that paralleled and foreshadowed the Sorbonne's denunciation of Rabelais. Not coincidentally, all three Italian writers are cited by the Gallic doctor, who openly espouses their parodic legacy in the writing of his own burlesque epic.

Much more subversive to the long-range interests of the Church than these high-spirited spoofs of chivalry was the growing interest in philology, historical exegesis, and the resurrection of dead languages by humanists such as Lorenzo Valla, who in 1457 demonstrated that the “Donation of Constantine,” a document supporting the papacy's claim to secular power, was in fact a forgery or linguistic counterfeit. While this discovery did not generate an immediate backlash at the Vatican, which prior to the Counter-Reformation patronized the new learning on an even grander scale than did Francis I, Nicola Beda and the Sorbonne in France were to take a much dimmer view of anything that even smacked of the new learning, going so far as to confiscate Greek books, censor humanist publications, and denounce scholars such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples as heretics. It is against this polarized backdrop that Gargantua urges his son to learn Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic as well as the requisite Latin (P, VIII, 193), and much of Rabelais's own linguistic ambivalence stems from a familiarity with Greek and Hebrew etymologies that he uses to enrich and equivocize the meaning of French words. At the same time, the enhanced sensitivity to linguistic misrepresentation growing out of Vallas's work converges in Rabelais with the old quarrel between nominalists and realists over the existence in nature of universals figuring in discourse.

While it is common to talk of Renaissance France's debt to Italy, French religious ferment in the sixteenth century was also shaped by events taking place in the North. Martin Luther's theses decrying Church abuses had been posted in 1517, and his ideology quickly spread to France, where religious dissenters were labeled Lutheristes by the Sorbonne at least as early as the 1520s. An even more important German contribution to French Renaissance culture was Johannes Gutenberg's invention in the 1440s and early 1450s of printing with movable type, which would become a powerful catalyst in both the Renaissance and the Reform. By the end of the century, presses had been set up all over Europe, including Paris and Lyon, and the writings of both ancient and modern classicists, as well as those of scientists and theologians, became available to would-be scholars as fast as the printers could produce them. Though the sudden deluge of printed material in the Renaissance, available only in rare manuscripts prior to the 1450s, may seem minor in comparison with the twentieth century's computer-aided information explosion, the analogy does give us a clearer perspective on Gargantua's wish for his son to become an “inexhaustible storehouse [abysme] of knowledge” (P, VIII, 194), a dream fueled in part by the vast quantities of information placed in circulation by the new technology.

The massive breadth of Rabelais's own erudition, evident in his easy references to Lucian, Pliny, Heraclitus, and dozens of other authors, is a clear product of the printing revolution, which allowed scholars to amass, cross-reference, and compare numerous texts from highly divergent sources instead of devoting years to a single rare manuscript.¹⁶ At the same time, though, it is safe to say that the invention contributed to the epistemological crisis of Rabelais and other discerning contemporaries. First of all, the mass-production on paper of words that had been recited face to face in oral literature, and that later were transcribed by a hand-held quill, doubtless aggravates the sense of distance between signified and signifier informing the Rabelaisian text. Not coincidentally, the crisis of representation that accompanies the birth of printing is most evident in the proliferation of printed monetary notes worth far less than the gold standard they symbolize: these paper notes, arguably, are the “monkeymoney” exchanged at Medamothi, made not from precious metal but copied apishly onto leaves made from trees.

Second, the vast quantity of data from heterogeneous sources that was placed in circulation by the printing process tended on the whole to raise more questions than it answered, making scholars like Rabelais acutely aware of contradictions within canonical bodies of knowledge. In the years between 1534 and 1546, Gargantua's optimism about the wealth of learning available to his son had evolved into Panurge's lacs de perplexité or “gin of perplexity” (TB, XXXVII, 430), a state of total confusion before the mass of information confronting him. Clearly, accelerated change and exchange in the Renaissance had negative as well as positive ramifications.

Not just vehicles of intellectual commerce and catalysts of social change, printed books in the Renaissance were also significant objects of exchange, contributing to the prosperity of cities like Lyon and Paris. As a result, literacy itself became even more of a marketable commodity that it had been previously, a fact reflected by the sizable number of intellectuals who found work, often part-time, in and around the printing industry. Despite his evocation of the oral-aural tradition and the reservations about the longevity of printing he voices in the prologue to Pantagruel, Rabelais capitalized as fully as any intellectual of his time on the advantages afforded him by the new medium, churning out almanacs, prognostications, and popular novels in addition to medical and legal translations. True, royalties as we know them did not exist in the sixteenth century, and the margin of profit associated with printing was relatively low, suggesting to some scholars that authors received no financial remuneration. Given the nature and timing of Rabelais's output, however, which regularly appeared during periods of economic hardship for the doctor, it seems reasonable to accept, at least hypothetically, the author's own contention that he is serving Pantagruel à gaiges or “for wages” (OC, P, Prol., 169).

Not all the publishing ventures of the sixteenth century were as successful as the Pantagrueline Tales, to be sure. One of the industry's signal failures, at least in terms of sales and dissemination, was a small, unprepossessing volume, entitled De Revolutionibus, in which Copernicus upended the centuries-old premises of Ptolomeic cosmography. Published in 1543, the treatise further destabilized the cognitive and epistemological underpinnings of Western culture by proposing that the earth, far from being the stable center of the universe, is in fact mobile, revolving around the sun. Though there is no clear reference to De Revolutionibus in the Pantagrueline Tales, it is appealing to imagine that Rabelais had read or heard of the Copernican text prior to the composition of his vertiginous Fourth Book in the late 1540s. Even if this is not the case, the similarities between Rabelais's mobile world and that of Copernicus represent kindred manifestations of the intellectual ferment sweeping over Europe in the sixteenth century.

While Copernicus was turning the medieval laws of astrophysics upside down, Renaissance navigators were making some revolutionary discoveries of their own. In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the world, demonstrating once and for all that the earth was spherical instead of flat, and between them, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci discovered a new continent. It is generally agreed that these voyages of discovery, like De Revolutionibus, had little immediate impact upon the public consciousness. Nevertheless, Rabelais's clear allusion in his Fourth Book to Jacques Cartier's quest for a northwest passage, along with the entire ocean voyage sequence and his familiarity with shipbuilders' jargon, bears witness to a mind profoundly imprinted with the known world's sudden expansion.

ADAPTATION AND VARIATION: THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE MAN

On a biographical level, Rabelais's own turbulent life was a mirror of the changing times in which he lived. Though his first vocation was that of a Franciscan monk, which by its very nature implies stability and even a resistance to change, Rabelais not only switched monasteries and monastic orders over the years, becoming a Benedictine and eventually a secular monk, but also traveled extensively throughout France and Italy and wore a variety of different professional hats: philologist, physician, scholar, editor, novelist, poet, secretary, librarian, botanist, and diplomat. While today we often stigmatize such career fluctuations as “unstable,” well-roundedness was a Renaissance ideal, evident not only in the characterization of Panurge as a jack-of-all-trades and in the broad liberal education of the giants, but also in the real-life versatility of men like Leonardo da Vinci, at once poet and painter, inventor and architect. This drive to know and do that we see in the prototypical uomo universale or “Renaissance man” reflects the radically expanding horizons of learned culture as a whole during the Renaissance, in fields as diverse as geography, cosmology, theology, and philology.

At the same time, the erratic track of Rabelais's biography cannot be wholly explained as a desire for intellectual fulfillment, for to do so ignores the economic realities that clearly affected some of his career changes. The social mobility that enabled Renaissance men such as Rabelais to break away from their farms, families, and traditional economic base to pursue their own individual talents and interests carried with it newfound monetary pressures that were largely absent within the protective womb of home and cloister. Though Rabelais's family was affluent, his share of their wealth very likely devolved to the Church when he took his vows. In any event, the financial references in Rabelais's fiction and his correspondence allow us to speculate that part of his evolution, including his shift from humanist physician to scatological novelist and his association with a parade of patrons, was financially as well as ideologically motivated.

Compounding the artist's financial worries was political pressure from the Sorbonne, Parlement, the Church, the Franciscans, and the Benedictines. Their repressive policies elicited from Rabelais a circuitous series of adaptive tactics that resemble the parrying and thrusting, dodging and darting of an experienced jouster. By using a pseudonym, veiling his discourse in ambiguity, applying to well-placed patrons, and generally living his life à tâtons (gropingly), he managed to deflect his opposition again and again. As a result, the biographical tracks he has left us mimic the constantly changing course of a navigator, who adjusts his speed and direction repeatedly to compensate for wind shifts, icebergs, and enemy vessels.

Rabelais's life is characterized not only by change but by exchange as well. Our first documented glimpse of him is his letter of 4 March 1521 to Guillaume Budé, the spiritual father of French humanism, in which Rabelais expresses admiration for Budé's scholarship and a desire to follow in his footsteps. We learn from the letter that Rabelais was at the time a Franciscan monk or novice at the monastery of Puy-Saint-Martin in Fontenay-le-Comte, a feudal town known for its flourishing market and for the plethora of lawyers attached to the royal courts based there.¹⁷ Though the abbey would prove overly restrictive in the long term, Rabelais made the acquaintance there of another young humanist, Pierre Amy, and together they exchanged ideas about the new learning and Roman law with lawyers from the town.

One of the more notable advocates privy to these discussions was André Tiraqueau, who in 1513 had published two treatises on marriage portraying woman as an inferior creature subordinate to her husband. It is likely that the seed for Rabelais's Third Book, which revolves around the querelle des femmes or “woman question,” was planted during this period, since his name figures in the foreword of a profeminist volume written by Amaury Bouchard and published by Josse Bade in 1522.

Shortly after the Sorbonne's confiscation of his Greek texts in 1523, Rabelais applied for and was granted a papal indult to leave the Franciscan convent at Puy-Saint-Martin and join the Benedictine Abbey of Maillezais at Saint-Pierre-de-la-Fontaine-le-Comte, then under the bishopric of Geoffroy d’Estissac. Very soon after his arrival, Rabelais entered the bishop's service at the priory of Ligugé as a secretary and perhaps tutor to the bishop's nephew, Louis. Rabelais's duties involved accompanying his patron to supervise construction projects throughout Poitou, a region that crops up repeatedly in the Pantagrueline Tales.

Rabelais apparently left Ligugé in or around 1527, the year in which the bishop's nephew was married. From that year until 1530, when Rabelais matriculated as a medical student at the University of Montpellier, we have no documents concerning his activities, but the wealth of information about Paris and France's provincial university towns suggests to some scholars that Rabelais undertook a peripatetic educational tour similar to that of Pantagruel, visiting the universities of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Bourges, Orleans, and Paris during the closing years of the decade. It is likely that Rabelais was engaging in commerce of a different kind on the side. Two of his natural children, Junie and François, were probably born to a Parisian widow during this period, the fruit of a type of liaison formally forbidden but widely practiced among clerics.

On 17 September 1530 Rabelais reappears in the historical record when he registered as a medical student at the University of Montpellier, long recognized throughout Europe for the distinction of its medical faculty. Like most humanists, Rabelais had already acquainted himself with the principal medical texts of antiquity, a fact that helps explain his acquisition of a bachelor's degree 15 days after the beginning of lectures. While Rabelais is famous for having participated in some of the first dissections and autopsies at Montpellier, it would be inaccurate to deduce that his course of studies was primarily clinical. On the contrary, ancient texts were the primary source of medical lore for budding physicians at Montpellier. We know that Rabelais himself obtained his medical credentials by expurgating the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and Galen's Ars parva, both in the original Greek.

If medicine was a natural extension of Rabelais's humanistic studies, there was one important distinction: the medical degree enabled him to exchange knowledge for money by working as a paid physician. Rabelais's first known appointment as a doctor took place on 1 November 1532 at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon, one of the most important financial and trade centers in Europe. Situated on a major waterway and at the intersection of trade routes linking Flanders, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, Lyon was a natural hub of international commerce and hosted four major fairs annually, attracting buyers and sellers from all over the continent. One of Lyon's principal industries in 1532 was the printing trade, which inevitably attracted literati eager to discuss and participate in the production of humanistic texts. Because of the presses there, impoverished scholars had the opportunity to supplement their income by working as editors, proofreaders, and translators, an option that probably influenced Rabelais's decision to settle there in 1532. Shortly after his arrival in Lyon, and several months prior to his medical appointment, Rabelais provided an introduction to the medical writings of Jean Manardi, a Ferrarese doctor, which were published by Sebastien Gryphius in 1532 upon Rabelais's recommendation. During the summer of his relocation to Lyon, Rabelais also published with Gryphius the edition of Hippocrates' Aphorisms that he had prepared at Montpellier. Within the intellectual marketplace, these two learned editions helped establish Rabelais's reputation as a medical authority and enhanced his opportunities for more lucrative and stimulating employment.

Receiving an appointment at the Hôtel-Dieu, an old and prestigious hospital in Lyon, was a signal honor for Rabelais, who helped lower the mortality rate by 2-3 percent during his tenure there.¹⁸ In exchange for his efforts, he received the rather modest sum of 40 livres tournois (pounds) per annum.¹⁹ Given the currency's decreasing buying power during the inflationary 1530s, it seems likely that Rabelais's hospital stipend only partially alleviated the faulte d’argent (lack of money) about which he wrote repeatedly during this era. That he turned to fiction at precisely this point, after leaving the financial security of cloistered life and before entering the service of a wealthy patron, suggests that the rhetoric of buying and selling in the prologue of Pantagruel, the first book, has biographical as well as metaphorical resonances. Like a fair number of scholars today, Rabelais supplemented his income by writing fiction on the side under a pseudonym, beginning with a scatological mock epic entitled Pantagruel, published in the fall of 1532 by Claude Nourry.

The early 1530s were an extraordinarily eventful period in the life of Rabelais. In addition to taking his first medical degree, becoming a practicing physician, and publishing the three texts previously mentioned, Rabelais edited the Will of Lucius Cupidus, an apocryphal legal document that scholars in the Renaissance believed to be an ancient Roman codicil. In late 1532 or early 1533, he capitalized on the prevailing vogue for astrological and prophetic literature by publishing at least two parodies of the genre: the Pantagrueline Prognostication and the Almanac for the Year 1533, of which only brief fragments survive. Presumably the works met with considerable commercial success, for Rabelais continued to produce almanacs well into the next decade, probably earning a small but significant income from their sale. Resourcefully fanning the flame of success, Rabelais followed his Pantagruel with a sequel entitled Gargantua in 1534, published before the public's enthusiasm for the first volume had had a chance to wane.

Rabelais first visited Italy earlier that same year when Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, engaged the physician to treat his sciatica during negotiations with the pope regarding Henry VIII's divorce. Because of its rich history and distinguished writers, Rome was considered by Renaissance humanists to be the capital of the world (OC, 970), and well before arriving Rabelais had mapped out an itinerary for his pilgrimage, which he shared with Jean du Bellay in a letter dated 31 August 1534. First, he planned to engage in intellectual commerce, conferring with Italian humanists and studying the indigenous flora and fauna of the region. The dialogues that Rabelais opened with fellow scholars in Italy were apparently a source of satisfaction to him, but his botanical studies were considerably less successful, primarily because the “sameness” of Rome's flora and fauna rendered the acquisition of this knowledge unproductive. “Italy,” Rabelais tells us in the letter, “has no plant, no animal, that I had not seen previously.”²⁰ In the same letter, the doctor indicates that he had also intended to prepare a topography of Rome, but the Italian scholar Bartolomeo Marliani stole a march upon him, producing a map so ingenious that Rabelais abandoned his own project and arranged for Marliani's topography to be printed in France. Interestingly enough, Rabelais phrases the entire episode in economic terms. The topography was to have been the “fruit” (OC, 972) or profit reaped from time invested exploring the streets of Rome, yet far from being resentful at Marliani, Rabelais proclaims himself to be indebted (je lui dois [OC, 972]) to his colleague for bringing the dream to fruition. That Rabelais considered himself “indebted” further suggests that he ultimately viewed wealth as intellectual rather than financial, at least at this point in his career.

Rabelais's second visit to Rome coincided with the lavishly staged arrival of Charles V, who, having just defeated the pirate Barbarossa in Tunisia, was marching northward from Sicily in an effort to strengthen his power base in Italy and obtain funding from Italian princes, including the pope. The imperial visit set off a flurry of politicking and posturing that is chronicled by Rabelais in his correspondence with Geoffroy d’Estissac. Though these epistles are again laced with economic terminology, they differ radically in tone and subject matter from the high-minded letters to Jean du Bellay following Rabelais's first visit to Rome. Whereas the earlier letter focuses upon intellectual profit and moral debts, Rabelais in his second series of Roman letters dwells almost entirely upon the underside of the Eternal City's economy. In a style curiously devoid of humor, Rabelais deplores the gratuities required in Rome for simple services like mail delivery, the bribes necessary for favorable legal and ecclesiastical decisions, the lack of compensation to owners whose property is annexed by the papacy, and the unjust taxation of even artisans and laborers to support the Vatican's extravagance.

Permeated with references to money, these epistles reveal the shaky state of Rabelais's own finances, a problem exacerbated by living in Rome. To help defray his unexpected expenses and ease the tightening of his purse strings, Rabelais requested financial assistance from his mentor over and above the loan he had already received and spent. “I am constrained to appeal to you again for alms,” writes Rabelais, “for the thirty ecuz you graciously had delivered to me here are almost gone, and I have not spent them on wickedness or food.”²¹ Not only was the cost of living high in rome, he explained, but his finances had been depleted by efforts to regularize his standing with the Church. As a favor to du Bellay, the pope eventually granted Rabelais an indult free of charge, pardoning him for abandoning the cloister, but the costs of preparing the appeal, obtaining the proper documentation, and expediting the review process were substantial.

That Rabelais should request such an indult, risking personal bankruptcy in exchange for papal forgiveness, seems at first glance inconsistent with the satire of ecclesiastical favors that permeates the pages of his fiction. Janotus de Bragamardo, who attempts to ransom the bells of Notre Dame with the “pardons and indulgences” (G, XIX, 56) in which prelates traditionally traffic, commands only scorn and pity from the wayward Gargantua, whose decision to return the bells that he stole is a moral one, undertaken in direct opposition to all the “deals” the Church has to offer. Unlike the wealthy and self-sufficient Utopian prince, however, who can thumb his nose at ecclesiastical favor with impunity, Rabelais the man was subject to the same economic constraints that cause the Papefigues (Popefiggers) of the Fourth Book to pay tribute to the Church, despite their irreverence toward the papacy. By obtaining the papal indult, Rabelais improved his shaky financial prospects, putting himself in line for revenues from ecclesiastical benefices for which he would otherwise have been ineligible. Within the economy of salvation, moreover, he was hedging his bets a century earlier than Pascal: for if divine judgment does hinge on pardons and indulgences, a proposition that Rabelais the writer deemed unlikely, the cash he had spent to obtain the indult was clearly a blue-chip investment.

In the fall of 1539, Rabelais's career branched off in yet another direction. France at the time occupied the northern Italian province of Piemonte, which Francis I hoped to use as a stepping-stone to the duchy of Milan, and in 1539 Guillaume du Bellay, Sieur de Langey and brother of the recently elevated cardinal, was appointed governor of the territory. As his physician he chose Rabelais, who during his sojourn in Turin maintained the governor's library and pursued the botanical studies he had begun in Poitou many years earlier. Despite his admiration for Langey and the generlaly fulfilling nature of his duties, Rabelais's tenure as the governor's secretary and physician was fraught with trials that again tested his resiliency. In 1540 his epistolary candor caused a stir when a letter of his detailing the du Bellay family's tolerant attitude toward Reformers was made public, resulting in embarrassment to both Rabelais and his patron. Not long afterwards, during a brief return home the next year, Rabelais responded to the increasingly restrictive atmosphere in France by toning down the theological satire in revised editions of his first two novels. That the new volumes failed to pass muster with the Sorbonne's censors, despite changes designed specifically to placate the theology faculty, may be partially explained by Etienne Dolet's mischief. That very same year, without Rabelais's permission, he published pirated editions of the original Gargantua and Pantagruel, effectively nullifying Rabelais's painstaking efforts to maintain a low and politically correct profile. Openly derisive toward Sorbonne theologians, who are scornfully referred to as sorbonagres and sorbonicoles, these peppery texts from the early 1530s served to keep Rabelais's youthful outspokenness in the public eye during an era of increasing repression.

On a more personal level, the “exchange” from life to death that so fascinates the mature Rabelais, subtending the entire Fourth Book, struck close to home during the early 1540s. The loss of his third illegitimate child, a two-year-old son named Théodule, is documented in a Latin poem by Jean Boyssonné, who also poeticized the passing of Langey's wife in 1541, writing an elegy that he transmitted to the governor via Rabelais. Less than two years later, in January of 1543, Langey himself would also die after a long and painful illness, willing Rabelais a yearly income that ironically went to pay the governor's own creditors. Only a few months afterward, Rabelais lost his first and lifelong mentor, Geoffroy d’Estissac.

Between Langey's death in 1543 and the publication of the Third Book in 1546, Rabelais appears to have weathered the Sorbonne's disapproval by maintaining the good favor of Francis I. In his Discours de la Court, published in 1543, Claude Chappuys lists Rabelais among the Masters of the King's Requests, an honorary title accorded to scholars and poets in the monarch's entourage. Two years later, in 1545, Francis granted “my beloved and faithful François Rabelais” a ten-year privilege for publication of his Pantagrueline Tales. Based on the limited biographical traces to which we have access, however, it appears that the doctor's favored status with the monarchy changed radically in 1546, with publication of the controversial Third Book.

That Rabelais willingly jeopardized his standing with the king is unlikely. Given the death of his mentors, his lack of revenue from Langey's estate, and the purely titular nature of his position as Master of Requests, Rabelais was probably strapped for funds when he wrote his third novel, which opens with a three-chapter discourse on debt. Less overtly irreverent than its predecessors, the Third Book was nonetheless censored by the Sorbonne, ostensibly for a one-word printing error confusing “soul” (âme) with “ass” (âne). The king's apparent failure to protect his “beloved and faithful” writer this time, as he had on several previous occasions, reflects a growing tendency on the part of Francis I to give Parlement and the Sorbonne a free rein in their crackdown on dissidence. That same year, Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake for questioning the immortality of the soul.

Possibly to avoid a similar fate, Rabelais fled to Metz, a town outside French soil at that time that was known for its tolerance toward Reformers. City records indicate that during his brief stay there Rabelais earned 120 livres annually for unspecified services to the municipality, a modest sum that the doctor attempted to bolster by asking Jean du Bellay for assistance. While the cardinal's response to Rabelais's plea for help is unknown, a year later he summoned his former physician to accompany him to Italy on a mission for the new king, Henry II. On the way south, Rabelais presented to his publisher a partial edition of the Fourth Book, the uncharacteristic sloppiness of which suggests two possibilities: either Rabelais was low on cash or he was seeking a quick forum to refute the Sorbonne's charges of heresy.

The move to Rome marked an upturn in Rabelais's vacillating fortunes insofar as it returned him to the epicenter of intellectual ferment in Europe, enhancing his opportunities for philosophical commerce, and provided him access to the cardinal's powerful intimates, who could bend the king's ear in his favor. A particular admirer of Rabelais among this group was Cardinal Odet de Coligny, to whom the doctor dedicated his Fourth Book. Embittered by the diatribe of Gabriel du Puy Herbault, which appeared in 1549, Rabelais apparently was on the verge of laying down his pen altogether, threatening to “write no jot more” (FB, Dedicatory Epistle to Monseigneur Odet, 491). Fortunately for us, Odet de Coligny persuaded Rabelais to seek special permission to publish from King Henry II, who, like his father, turned out to be a fan of the Pantagrueline Tales.

Never averse to turning a profit, Rabelais did his best to exploit this happy coincidence, churning out a royal panegyric in 1549 that is markedly un-Rabelaisian. His Sciomachie, a mundane account of the festivities orchestrated by Cardinal du Bellay to celebrate the birth of Henry's son, represents more than anything else a foray into the economy of favors and influence. By eulogizing du Bellay's devotion to his king, Rabelais invites a reciprocal loyalty on the part of Henry, who had demoted the cardinal earlier that year. At the same time, Rabelais himself undoubtedly hoped to benefit from the Sciomachie, using it as a tribute to be traded for patronage and protection.²²

The strategy almost succeeded: as late as 1551 Rabelais seemed to be secure in the favor of the king and untroubled by his eternal “lack of money.” Thanks to his old patron, Jean du Bellay, Rabelais was during that year appointed curé of Saint-Martin-de-Meudon, a benefice that entitled him to at least 300 livres per annum. Concurrently, he was finishing up an expanded edition of his Fourth Book, where for the first time he laced his writing with potshots at the papacy, a ploy apparently calculated to garner favor with the French monarchy, which had been at loggerheads with the Vatican since 1547. As it turned out, however, Rabelais had hitched his political destiny to a falling star. The wind of international politics into which he cast his “plume” or feather pen (OC, FB, Dedicatory Epistle to Monseigneur Odet, 521) dramatically shifted prior to the Fourth Book's publication early in 1552, as Julius III apologized to Henry II and the wheels of reconciliation were set in motion. Antipapal rhetoric fell out of fashion, and the Fourth Book of Rabelais was summarily censured by the Sorbonne and banned by the Parlement.

What happened to Rabelais thereafter, in the wake of his investment in a bandwagon that foundered, remains shrouded in mystery. Two epitaphs published the next year, one in May by Jacques Tahureau and the other in November by Pierre de Ronsard, suggest that Rabelais probably died in early 1553, transacting his ultimate “exchange.” Following his death, unauthorized editions of his works continued to flood the market, and in 1562 the Isle Sonante (Ringing Island) appeared, the first installment of what now constitutes the Fifth Book. Though this posthumous novel continues the navigations of Pantagruel, the ecclesiastical satire is so transparent and the invective so virulent that most scholars dispute its authenticity, leaving us with yet another mystery.

Beginning and ending with a question mark, then, Rabelais's biographical and literary tracks continue to perplex readers even today. Instead of trying to reshape these ill-fitting puzzle parts into a monolithic whole, we propose to seek Rabelais's sustantificque mouelle in the ambiguities and bipolarities that he has left us, seeking the explanation for this polyvalence in the twin forces of change and exchange.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Rabelais in English are from The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques LeClercq (1936; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1944). Quotations in French, where necessary for clarification and amplification, are from Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols., ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1955); hereafter cited in the text as OC.

2. The term “cornucopian text” is borrowed from Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).

3. The judgments of Rabelais are cited in notes to Gargantua, ed. Jean-Christian Dumont (Paris: Nouveaux Classiques Larousse, 1972), 167-68.

4. For a discussion of the Fifth Book's authenticity, see Alfred Glauser, Le Faux Rabelais, ou L’ Inauthenticité du “Cinquiesme Livre” (Paris: Nizet, 1975); and Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammarien: De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’ authenticité (Etudes Rabelaisiennes 16) (Geneva: Droz, 1981).

5. See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

6. Mikhail Bakhtin expounds this theory in Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iwolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

7. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

8. Numerous scholars have noted the importance of economic elements and structures of exchange in Rabelais. See, for example, Guy Demerson, Rabelais: Une vie, une oeuvre, une époque (Paris: Balland, 1986).

9. That this analogy between coins and words was widespread in the sixteenth century is demonstrated by Danielle Trudeau, “Langue et monnaie au 16e siècle,” Stanford French Review 7 (Spring 1983): 37-55. In Rabelais's case, the analogy is clearly operative in the printer's salutation preceding the expurgated Gargantua and Pantagruel of 1542, where readers are urged to distinguish between la faulse monnoye or “false money” of Dolet's pirated text and la bonne monnoye or “good money” of the authorized edition. See Michael B. Kline, Rabelais and the Age of Printing (Etudes Rabelaisiennes 4) (Geneva: Droz, 1963). Within the body of the text, references to money and coins include écus, marcs d’or (G, XLVI, 135), moutons à la grand laine (G, VIII, 30), unzain (G, XXV, 80), bezans d’or (G, XXXI, 94; G, LI, 146), philippus (G, XXXII, 95), sou (G, XXXIII, 98), carolus (G, XLVI, 133), saluz (G, XLVI, 134), ducatz (G, XLVI, 135; P, XXI, 263, 264), seraphs (P, XIV, 229), teston (P, XVI, 242), denier (P, XVII, 244), liards (P, XVII, 244), fleurins (P, XVII, 245), francs (P, XVII, 247), and gettons (P, XXI, 263).

10. The reference to du Bellay, quoted by Trudeau, “Langue et monnaie” (49), is taken from Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. H. Chamard (1549; Paris: Didier, 1966), 196-97. Textual citations of the correspondence between Erasmus and Budé refer to the French translation by Marie-Madeleine de la Garanderie, La Correspondance d’Erasme et de Guillaume Budé (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967).

11. R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 168.

12. Ibid., 168-69.

13. See R. J. Knecht, French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II (London: Longman, 1984), 5-7; and J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 27-57.

14. From The Travel Journey of Antonio De Beatis, ed. J. R. Hale (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1979), 165, quoted in R. J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 305.

15. For a discussion of the Avignon connection, see Franco Simone, The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, trans. H. Gaston Hall (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 37-78.

16. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

17. The biographical data included here generally follow the outline of Jean Plattard, The Life of François Rabelais, trans. Louis P. Roche (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1968).

18. Ibid., 111-12.

19. The livre tournois or “Tours pound” was France's official money of account in the sixteenth century and originally was worth a pound (livre) of silver. In Rabelais's day, the livre was not coined at Tours, as it had been through the thirteenth century, but functioned instead as an ideal or imaginary standard that was equivalent to 20 sous (shillings) or 240 deniers (pence) and was payable in ever-decreasing quantities of “real” coins, including the écu (crown). For more information on coinage and monetary values in the age of Rabelais, see Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 293-94; and Frank C. Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493-1725 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). The real buying power of these currencies and of Rabelais's stipend is more difficult to assess. We know that the barber-surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu received the same salary as his more illustrious supervisor (Plattard, Life of Rabelais [112]), and that half that amount was received by a typical Paris-area vineyard worker in 1510 (F. P. Braudel and Frank P. Spooner, “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, ed. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967], 374-486). The difference between the two stipends diminishes considerably when we factor in the effects of devaluation over a 22-year period and the barter goods that typically augmented agricultural wages. Not surprisingly, Plattard concludes that Rabelais's salary was little more than an honorarium.

20. “L’Italie n’a nulle plante, nul animal, que je n’eusse vu et noté auparavant” (OC, 972).

21. “Je suis contrainct de recourir encores à vos aulmosnes, car les trente escus qu’il vous pleust me faire icy livrer sont quasi venus à leur fin, et si n’en ay rien despendu en meschanceté ny pour ma bouche” (OC, 986).

22. See Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie (Etudes Rabelaisiennes 24) (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 61-78, 183-223.