Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy

Our Religion, The Political State, Private Life

“For in here,” reads François Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua, “you will find quite a different taste and more abstruse doctrine, which will reveal to you some very lofty sacraments and horrific mysteries concerning your religion as well as the political state [l’estat politicq] and private life.”^[1] So begins a tale of epic size about a monarchical dynasty of giants ruling Renaissance France. Rabelais’s claim to seriousness may be a comic boast, but testing it provides the only way to find out, for the writer left few clues about who he was. Born in either 1483 or 1494 in the Loire Valley town of Chinon, France, Rabelais entered the local monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte in the early 1520s. A letter to the well-known humanist Guillaume Budé from that location provides the earliest look into Rabelais’s life. The young friar describes himself as “a nobody lost in the mass” (CW, 735) yet in love with “belles lettres” and happy to see that “all humanity, or nearly all, is regaining its ancient splendor” (CW, 736). He writes confidently, but with an awkward obsequiousness. Aside from Rabelais’s subsequent work as a medical doctor in Lyon (beginning in 1532) and his time in Italy with the prominent du Bellay family, we know little else. The books provide our access to the man: Gargantua (1535; the first in the dramatic sequence but the second published), Pantagruel (1532), and the Tiers (1546), Quart (1548–1552), and Cinquiesme (1564) Livres. Readers almost have to believe Rabelais when he says in Gargantua that he intends to write about religion, politics, and private matters. Nothing in his recorded life contradicts that intent because there is so little to contradict it.

Rabelais did write often about the themes he mentioned in the Gargantua prologue, especially politics. Chapters on royal education in the first two books, Gargantua and Pantagruel, reflect the mirrors-of-princes genre exemplified by Desiderius Erasmus’s 1516 Education of a Christian Prince. Consequently, Rabelais’s works have been read as “fictions, many of whose episodes can be read as representations of the way a good prince, any good prince, should act.”^[2] On the other hand, the Tiers Livre, which depicts a character named Panurge (a companion of Pantagruel) considering his marriage prospects, has been taken as a contribution to the querrelle des femmes (the “woman question”). This sixteenth century debate was fraught with sensitive religious and moral components. In the later parts of Rabelais’s work, grave passages on the death of heroes in the modern world (QL 28, 604–605 / CW, 497–198) and the difficulties of human judgment (TL 44, 488–490 / CW, 390–392) reveal a sobriety lacking in any merely comic writer.

In what way should readers respond, then, to a chapter in Pantagruel that sets out to explain “How Pantagruel of his farts engendered little men” (P 27, 308 / CW, 219)? Who could make heads or tails of characters like the Lords of Kissebreech and Suckfist (P 11, 254 / CW, 170)?^[3] What about Panurge’s memorable non-verbal argument with Thaumaste, the “great scholar from England”? “Panurge,” writes Rabelais, “undismayed [by Thaumaste’s sign], hoisted into the air his supercolossal codpiece with his left hand, and with his right took out of it a white rib of beef and two pieces of wood of the same shape . . . and made a sound such as the lepers do in Brittany . . . ” (P 19, 287 / CW, 198–199). This is to say nothing of the notorious story of Hans Carvel’s ring (TL 28, 442–443 / CW, 346–347), on how a husband might maintain a wife’s fidelity, the moral of which makes any cultivated person blush.^[4] Looking back from here, the “lofty sacraments” of the Gargantua prologue acquire a tincture of grandiosity.

In fact, the dissonance that readers feel leafing through Rabelais’s books unearths something important. A certain expectation comes with opening a book purporting to treat the topics that Rabelais chooses to write on. One seeks weightiness, sophistication, ceremony. Rabelais sometimes indulges this expectation, but he also disarms it. The double-sidedness of Rabelais’s writing waylays and perplexes, although it actually indicates a fullness of vision. Rabelais forays into all the corners of life—its nobility and rationality, its baseness and absurdity. He does not always say solemn things simply because he writes about things that people take solemnly. He never commits this error of conflation. One could even surmise—and I would argue—that the topics Rabelais assumes inspire or even necessitate his attention on the unseemly. Rabelais sees that politics makes this underside of human nature its business. By exceeding the accepted limits of speech and action (what the Greeks called nomoi), Rabelais provides a new vantage of those limits that allows for evaluation of their virtues and vices.

Thematically Organizing Rabelais’s Books

Although Gargantua and Pantagruel contain the most obviously political passages in Rabelais, I focus on the Tiers Livre and discuss the other books as they relate to it because I am not interested in what Rabelais has to say about politics as such, but rather in his treatment of this curious subject that he refers to as “the political state” [l’estat politicq] and in his explanation of how this subject relates to the religious and private spheres of life [nostre religion; le vie oeconomicque]. The vagueness of these topics’ relationship may tempt readers to divide Rabelais’s books into sections, each dedicated to one of the three spheres that the author identifies as central to his work: religion here, politics there, and private life everywhere else. Episodes in the Quart Livre clearly ridicule the Catholic Church (see QL 29–32; 45–50). The Picrocholine War of Gargantua (see G 25–51) gives us Rabelais at his most political. Panurge’s marriage question in the Tiers Livre provides an obvious focus on private life. But cracks begin to form along these walls like spider webs. Gargantua’s Picrocholine War ends in the establishment of a religious institution, an idealized abbey, Thélème (G 52). Panurge’s “personal” marriage question in the Tiers Livre involves theology (TL 30) and law (TL 39–44). Discussions of faith raise the question of whether reason should guide one’s life (QL 30). Rabelais keeps his promise to treat all of his proposed topics, but he treats them simultaneously. It will not do to say that Rabelais loses interest in politics after he turns from the rule of two magnanimous kings in Gargantua and Pantagruel and writes about the private situation of the lowly vassal Panurge in the three remaining books. The end of the kings’ wars and the achievement of political empire make Panurge’s situation possible. These external, political conditions underwrite Panurge’s personal condition.

Panurge’s marriage problem most tightly links these political, religious, and private spheres. The Christian tradition uses marriage to represent Jesus’s relationship to his church.^[5] Marriage also serves as a public declaration and involves vows of loyalty between individuals. In the Tiers Livre, marriage first appears as a matter of self-interest. Panurge wants to know if a wife would make him happy.^[6] But notice how Panurge later poses the marriage question to Pantagruel. As time passes, Panurge begins to ask if he “should” or “must” marry (TL 30, 445 / CW, 349). With marriage, a possible tension between different goods arises.

The confusion of the religious, political, and private can also be seen by thinking slightly differently about Panurge’s marriage problem. That is, marriage raises specific issues, but these are traceable to general concerns. Repeat Panurge’s worries: Is it right to marry? Will marriage bring happiness? Turning these questions over in the mind, one sees that Panurge’s situation encourages reflection on moral concepts—rightness, happiness— that can be examined without ever mentioning marriage or Panurge. Panurge’s marriage serves as a case study in greater philosophic issues.

This was how Rabelais’s first English translator viewed Panurge’s marriage question. In his renderings of Rabelais, Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611– 1660) framed Panurge’s problem as the problem not of marriage but of fortune,^[7] much in the manner of peers of Rabelais such as Machiavelli. Even Machiavelli merely drew from an existing tradition dating from antiquity when he described fortune as a feminized concept, and he was not the only Renaissance writer to do so.^[8] Machiavelli’s real innovation was attributing frailty to Fortuna. As Hannah Pitkin notes with masterfully executed understatement, “the means of coping with [Fortuna] that [Machiavelli] suggests are not those usually applied to divinities.”^[9]

In his books, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await (see especially TL 27–35). Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme— femme meaning both woman and wife—may beat him. Through this dramatization, Panurge begins to hear the merits of viewing fortune as an intractable part of life that must be shouldered with the proper inner disposition rather than as an object susceptible of human conquest.

Cuckoldry as a Political and Philosophic Problem

Allow me to further compare Machiavelli and Rabelais to illustrate the difference. Although Machiavelli’s handling of the problem of fortune in chapter 25 of The Prince has earned extensive scholarly attention, critics seldom recognize that Machiavelli also approaches the theme of fortune exactly as Rabelais does: through the motif of cuckoldry. Cuckoldry provides the subject of Machiavelli’s only original comedy, Mandragola (1518).^[10] The play begins with a young man from France, Callimaco, set on the all-important question of whether Italian women are more beautiful than French women. Callimaco’s encounter with the Florentine Lucrezia Calfucci settles this question. The rest of the play concerns how Callimaco can fulfill his desire for Lucrezia, given her marriage to the old and doltish Messer Nicia. It is also about how Messer Nicia can achieve his desire for children, despite his impotence.

A mandrake-based potion that Lucrezia takes resolves both characters’ aims. The mandrake plant allegedly restores female fertility, but the drug has the unfortunate side-effect (so they say) of killing the first person a woman lays with after ingesting it. Of course the mandrake does no such thing, and of course Lucrezia is not barren. Yet believing these things allows both Callimaco and Nicia to achieve their respective goals, all while keeping a moral veneer. Through an elaborate scheme, Callimaco feigns medical expertise and prescribes the mandrake remedy to Nicia. Nicia and the others then set out to kidnap some unwitting, anonymous man (Callimaco, disguised) to “take the brunt” of the mandrake potion by sleeping with Lucrezia.

Harvey Mansfield argues that Nicia, whose “stupidity” receives several remarks,^[11] proves to be the shrewdest character in the play. Nicia appears stupid because he will tarnish his name for the sake of a familial legacy. He even acknowledges that going along with the plan for Lucrezia to take the mandrake will “make a wife a whore and myself a cuckold.”^[12]

“But why is that necessarily stupid?” Mansfield asks.^[13] The answer? Most people take monogamy for granted as something desirable and therefore think less of those unable to keep their partner monogamous. In other words, most people mistake the moral for the successful. It is also easier to identify with Callimaco’s short-range interest than with Nicia’s long-range outlook. Nevertheless, monogamy obstructs Nicia’s wish for children no less than it obstructs Callimaco’s wish for sex, and in fact the achievement of Nicia’s plan takes as much daring as does the achievement of Callimaco’s plan. One could say that Nicia must go further for children than Callimaco must for sex. Nicia faces ridicule. By becoming a cuckold to become a father, Nicia boldly steps outside convention. (Callimaco, whose true identity remains unknown to Nicia, refuses to take such a step.) As Nicia attests early in the play, his desire for children gives him the will “to do anything.”^[14]

If Nicia would “do anything” to achieve his end, then the meaning of Panurge’s name, which derives from the Greek πάνουργος [ready to do anything wicked or knavish], perfectly captures this spirit. Although this readiness to “do anything” manifests differently in Panurge than it does in Nicias (in the Tiers Livre, Panurge will do anything not to be cuckolded), that willingness reflects the same opinion regarding one’s ability to control life. Nicia and Panurge want different things out of their marriages, but they are willing to take the same means—any means—to those things.

This principle unites Machiavelli’s Mandragola to his political works. Machiavelli was discussing the impediments to perpetuating a regime’s political rule when he personified fortune as a woman in chapter 25 of The Prince. Likewise, Mansfield writes that the Mandragola “seems at first to tell of a private sexual conquest but turns out to have a political end.”^[15] This end includes not only the changing of morals but the perpetuation of Nicia’s family’s political power in Florence at any cost. Similarly, in Rabelais’s writing, Panurge’s hope for harmony in the home reflects an analogous hope for harmony in the world. He realizes that harmony in the home depends on his active rule over it. Panurge does not just assume his wife’s loving loyalty. So too, harmony in the world, political harmony, depends on humanity’s active rule.

As I will argue in Chapter 3, Panurge’s belief in a remedy for marital happiness corresponds to his belief in a remedy for political success. Where classical philosophy shied from politics,^[16] Panurge proposes a political “teaching” [enseigne] that he announces as a “new manner of building walls” [une maniere bein nouvelle de bastir les murailles] (P 15, 267 / CW, 182). Panurge’s confidence in these walls’ ability to protect the city in Pantagruel parallels his expectation in the Tiers Livre that he can somehow secure happiness in the home. Insofar as the plot of the Tiers Livre serves as a correction of Panurge,^[17] Rabelais’s book differs from Machiavelli’s writings in equal proportion. With respect to Panurge, Pantagruel recommends an acceptance of fate (see TL 9). In like fashion, Pantagruel would solve Nicia’s desire for children by dissolving it, not by seeking a morally suspicious workaround as Machiavelli has Nicia do. Rabelais does not take up the art of controlling others but upholds the virtue of self-control and the philosophical recognition of limits that Machiavelli denied.

More can be said about how cuckoldry points to a political problem. Just as partners in marriage strive for fidelity, civic-minded people work to maintain a good relationship with their country, their community, their regime, which—as Machiavelli’s Prince stresses^[18]—is always open to seduction by some rival. But not all people are so concerned about how fortune affects politics. They can live with being “cuckolded.” These are the philosophers. Like Nicia, the philosophers seem to lack vigilance or care. Non-philosophers worry that philosophers, indifferent as they are to the world of practice (because wrapped in the world of theory), would too easily allow politics to fall into the control of outsiders. This minority group must therefore watch what others think about them, as they remain seemingly dangerously detached from the goals and concerns of everyone else. For although I just compared the philosophers to Nicia, Nicia’s inner motives suggest that this similarity only goes surface deep.

The Rabelais-Machiavelli Connection

I want to be perfectly candid about the fact that Rabelais never refers to Machiavelli by name in his extant writings—not in his published works or in his few surviving private letters. Nevertheless, Rabelais’s historical context provides reason to expect his knowledge of Machiavelli. France’s political relationship with Italy soured in the 1490s. At that time, France aided the duke of Milan in his conflict with the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire. The Milanese returned France’s kindness by later siding against French King Charles VIII with the kingdom of Naples. Like others, Machiavelli discussed the subsequent claims France made to various Italian provinces at the turn of the century.^[19] As Donald Frame writes of those military expeditions, they ironically “resulted in the cultural conquest of France by Italy.”^[20] Rabelais’s eventual residence, Lyon, thereafter developed a printing industry interested in work on ancient texts. Rabelais’s arrival in the city coincided with the publication of Machiavelli’s Prince; the Discourses on Livy had been printed a year earlier, in 1531. As Willis Bowen writes, “Before Machiavelli’s most important works were put into French [in the early 1540s] they were already being read by Frenchmen. Although Bourciez is exaggerating when he says that during the reign of Francis I [1515–1547] three fourths of courtiers could read Italian, it is true that scholarly men did not need to wait for translations.”^[21] At any rate, Rabelais had found a local printer for Pantagruel, his first book, in 1532.

Rabelais also visited Rome several times. He lived for as many as six years in Italy over the course of four trips with his employer, the public-spirited Bishop of Paris, Jean du Bellay. Rabelais served du Bellay as a physician and acted as his unofficial confidant. He later travelled to the Piedmont with Jean’s older brother Guillaume, seigneur de Langey, to help meet the medical needs of the French military outpost there. Ianziti establishes that Machiavelli’s Art of War likely inspired Langey’s Instructions on the Deeds of War, which appropriates certain passages verbatim from Machiavelli’s work. Langey even reformed the French military according to recommendations made throughout Machiavelli’s writings. Langey’s literal reading of Machiavelli’s works garnered no shortage of attention, including that of Rabelais, showing both figures’ vast influence and pointing to Machiavelli’s warm, albeit indirect, reception in France. Widespread revulsion to Machiavellianism, Ianziti notes, did not develop in the francophone world until decades later, with the circulation and reception of Innocent Gentillet’s Anti-Machiavel.^[22]

Rabelais’s time in Italy was formative, as one missive that he wrote in 1534 to Jean du Bellay from Rome suggests. The letter was later used as a dedicatory epistle for Bartolomeo Marliani’s Topographia Antiquae Romae:

“Well before your stay in Rome, I had formed in the depths of my mind a notion, an idea of the things for which desire drew me there. First of all, I had decided to call on the famous learned men living in the places where we were to pass, and have informal discussions with them about certain difficulties that had long been bothering me. Next (and this was related to my specialty), I had to see some plants, animals, and remedies, that I was told were still unknown in France and were found in abundance in Italy. Finally, using my pen, as I would a brush, I had to depict the appearance of Rome in such wise that on my return there would be nothing I could not get out of my books for the purposes of my fellow citizens. On this subject, I had brought with me a pile of notes gathered in various Greek and Latin authors. On the first point, even if my wishes were not granted in full, I did not make out badly. As for the plants and animals, there are none in Italy that I did not see and know beforehand. I saw just one plane tree in Diana’s grotto in Aricia. As for the last point [of depicting Rome’s appearance with a pen], I went through so much trouble on it that no one, I think, knows his own house any better than I know Rome and its districts.” (CW, 758; bold mine.)

Rabelais states what his trip to Italy meant to him cautiously, and in so doing he creates an air of excitement. The “famous learned men” he convened with, their “informal discussions,” his “certain difficulties”—all of these whet the reader’s interest. The nature of these “certain difficulties” can be narrowed. Rabelais discloses that his task required him to bring “a pile of notes gathered in various Greek and Latin authors,” and that he wished to help his “fellow citizens.” His mission was, then, an intellectual–political one. Still, no smoking gun proves that these “certain difficulties” had anything to do with Machiavelli.

Because there is no recourse to Rabelais’s openly stated opinion of his Italian peer, I make a textually based argument that draws on their shared concerns and themes (in effect I carry out a comparative study). However, throughout my work I point to Rabelais’s many allusions that, I believe, suggest the two thinkers’ relationship. I will discuss my plan for overcoming the indirect nature of my evidence at greater length in Chapter 3, after describing Rabelais’s oblique writing style in Chapter 2.

Even if Rabelais opposes Machiavelli unintentionally or inadvertently and merely by virtue of his natural disposition, Rabelais’s re-articulation of classical philosophy still represents a serious alternative to Machiavelli’s “new modes and orders” (so akin to Panurge’s “new manner of building walls”). Comparing Rabelais and Machiavelli brings us back to a fork in the road of human history. The main thread of my argument pits Machiavelli’s aim to subjugate fortune, both personal and political, against Rabelais’s circumspect philosophy of Pantagruelism, described in the Quart Livre as “gaiety of spirit confected in contempt of fortuitous things” (QL prol, 523 / CW, 425).

Before beginning my argument, I provide a brief sketch of it for readers to follow.

Chapter Structures

As I just mentioned, Chapter 2 focuses on Rabelais’s writing, specifically on what Voltaire referred to as Rabelais’s “mask of folly.”^[23] This mask obscures Rabelais’s intention and purifies his readership so that only the “precious topers” and “most illustrious drinkers”—philosophic readers, I argue—receive his message. Rabelais recommends two modes of reading to this audience, interpretation “in good part” and “in the most perfect sense.” The first requires moral benevolence, a hermeneutic assumption of goodwill. The second, interpretation “in the most perfect sense,” refers to what I call philosophical benevolence. This rule of reading requires readers to construct the highest or strongest possible meaning of the text. Practicing philosophical benevolence means assuming coherence. These rules derive from the philosophy of Pantagruelism itself. The hermeneutic rules established in Chapter 2 also support Rabelais’s contention, advanced in the Gargantua prologue, that he writes about “our religion, the political state, and private life.”

Chapter 3 spans several of Rabelais’s books and lays out these grand themes. I begin by discussing what I call the Diogenic problem. In the prologue to the Tiers Livre, Rabelais turns the reader’s attention to the ancient setting of Diogenes’s Corinth, where a friend finds Diogenes rolling around his barrel as the city prepares for war. Diogenes, an apolitical because philosophic person, tells this friend that he rolls his barrel hither and thither because he fears being accused of “slacking and idling” by the Corinthians. The philosopher has concerns, in other words, about his apparent uselessness. Two solutions to the Diogenic problem are offered in Rabelais’s books. These are Panurge’s wall-building and Pantagruel’s Pantagruelism. Panurge’s wall-building attempts to solve the Diogenic problem by insisting that philosophy can be civic-minded. By building walls, the philosopher can protect the city from the vicissitudes of fortune, relieve non-philosophic citizens of their arduous duties, and win popular esteem. Yet wall-building has a downside. To build walls for the city, the new philosophers relinquish the intellectual independence so cherished by older thinkers such as Diogenes.

Pantagruelism recognizes the virtues of both the Diogenic and Machiavellian-Panurgian dispositions, but it rejects their vices. As “gaiety of spirit” and “contempt for fortuitous things,” Pantagruelism maintains that some things—things that are not fortuitous—can be met with human industry while others—things that are fortuitous—should be accepted philosophically. The Pantagruelist takes the middle of the road and concedes neither all nor nothing to fortune. For this reason, Pantagruelists recognize politics as a necessary sphere of life, but one that hardly solves humanity’s problems.

In Chapter 4, I begin an interpretation of the Tiers Livre and turn to the first chapter of the book. The Utopians’ conquest of Dipsody in that chapter provides the material for Rabelais’s critique of the Machiavellian regime by showing how that regime manifests in Pantagruel’s kingdom. Rabelais rather clearly gives Utopia the features of such a regime because Panurge will live under it, and therefore he will live with it. Panurge reaps what he sows. Utopia’s Machiavellianism has the ingenious purpose of educating Panurge by showing him that a community that has “built walls” still can have substantial problems. In portraying modern Utopia, Rabelais also suggests that contemplative philosophy has no place there; the city subjects everything necessity. “Duty and obedience” characterize the citizens of this political community (TL 1, 353 / CW, 261). There is no “slacking and idling” in Utopia, no Diogenes. Machiavellian–Utopian freedom is a civilized freedom that obeys the governing officials. These limits may be necessary for political stability, but do they produce an unadulterated good? They curtail, it seems, intellectual life.

In light of the necessity- and duty-bound character of the Utopian regime, Chapter 5 explores the concept of duty, especially its place in Machiavelli’s writings as well as in Panurge’s eulogy of debtes in chapters 2–5 of the Tiers Livre. Machiavellian duty conceals self-interest. This is precisely how Panurge uses duty in the Tiers Livre. Interpreting Machiavelli and Panurge “in good part” and “in the most perfect sense,” I argue that this move comprises an attempt to correct the plain and frankly problematic self-interestedness of Diogenes. But Pantagruel, in turn, corrects Machiavelli’s and Panurge’s selfish use of duty by showing that the moral and natural conditions of the cosmos allow for a kind of refined individualism that leads to greater neighborliness and honesty than a system of insincere obligations.

Nonetheless, Panurge continues to lay the “duty of marriage” on himself through the early chapters of the Tiers Livre. In Chapter 6, I cover chapters 29 through 44 of the book.^[24] These are the so-called consultations, the meetings that Panurge holds with a set of experts in the professional disciplines of theology, medicine, philosophy, and law. Here Rabelais provides a series of fragmented perspectives that combine and act as a bugbear that nearly squelches Panurge’s hope for stability and happiness with his wife. Taken together, these perspectives aim to teach Panurge that accepting fortune’s blows will provide him the best means of actually protecting himself from them.

Chapter 7 completes my interpretation of the Tiers Livre. There I focus on the quest for the answer to Panurge’s situation that the characters embark on after the consultations are completed. Before they set out to sea for the Divine Bottle and its “word” for Panurge, Pantagruel has the ships stocked with a mysterious Pantagruelion herb. I argue that Rabelais’s description of this herb provides a keyhole through which one can see the author’s view of nature. When one combines Rabelais’s description of Pantagruelion with the herb’s actual function in the Quart Livre, the author’s teaching on nature points to the need for and possibility of Platonic-Socratic πίστις,^[25] a human attribute or quality that rejects both the complete intelligibility and the complete mysteriousness of the cosmos. This view of nature comports well with the tenets of Pantagruelism.

Rabelais’s project does not focus so much on the political regime most conducive of human flourishing. He does not propose a certain type of legislature, executive, or court system. Aside from the Picrocholine War in Gargantua, he shows little interest in how states interact. Rabelais instead seeks an answer to the more pressing question of how intellectual life can flourish given the politicality of human beings. The questions that political philosophy often asks—about the appropriate or best regime, about the nature of authority and power, about distributive justice and class systems—all suppose a certain luxury. More basic is the fact that those who pursue the life of the mind face public pressures. Rabelais concerns himself with the intellectual’s place in the political world, and with whether philosophy should serve, guide, hide from, confront, oppose, or otherwise make peace or war with the political powers.

Notes

[1] François Rabelais, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), Gargantua prologue, 7. Hereafter referenced by book as ‘G’ (Gargantua), ‘P’ (Pantagruel), ‘TL’ (Tiers Livre), ‘QL’ (Quart Livre), and ’CL’ (Cinquiesme Livre). François Rabelais, The Complete Works of François Rabelais, ed. Donald Frame (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California Press, 1991), 4. Hereafter referenced as ‘CW’ followed by page number. Deviations from Frame’s translation reflect my interpretation of Rabelais’s French in Huchon’s Pléiade Gallimard edition. I note when I disagree with Frame about Rabelais’s French. Subsequent citations are placed in-text parenthetically and formatted by abbreviated reference, chapter number, and page number. References to Huchon and Frame are always separated by a forward slash. For example: (G prol, 7 / CW, 4).

^[2] Ullrich Langer, “Pantagruel and Gargantua: The political education of the king,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 111.

^[3] The tamer translation used by Urquhart. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Motteux (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005), 171ff. See P 11, 254 / CW, 170.

^[4] It is, however, noteworthy that Frère Jean calls Hans Carvel “philosophical.” See TL 28, 442 / CW, 346.

^[5] Mark 2:19; John 3:29. I use the ESV translation for all biblical references. ESV Study Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2007).

^[6] See TL 9, 377 / CW, 282: “You know that it is written veh soli [woe unto him who is alone].”

^[7] See, e.g., Urquhart’s renderings of the titles of chapters 11, 12, and 13 of the Tiers Livre: “How Pantagruel showeth the trial of one’s fortune by the throwing of dice to be unlawful” (TL 11), “How Pantagruel doth explore by the Virgilian lottery what fortune Panurge shall have in his marriage” (TL 12), “How Pantagruel adviseth Panurge to try the future good or bad luck of his marriage by dreams” (TL 13).

^[8] Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley L.A.: University of California Press, 1984), 138–139. See also Rafael Major, “A New Argument for Morality: Machiavelli and the Ancients,” Political Research Quarterly 60 (2007): 171–179.

^[9] Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 144.

^[10] See “Introduction” in Niccolò Machiavelli, Mandragola, 2nd, trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1981), 2: “The Prologue to Machiavelli’s Clizia acknowledges its source in Roman comedy (Plautus’ Casina) . . . .”

^[11] See, for example, Machiavelli, Mandragola, 1.3 (17); 2.4 (23).

^[12] Machiavelli, Mandragola, 1.6 (25).

^[13] Harvey C. Mansfield, “The Cuckold in Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” in The Comedy & Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 28.

^[14] Machiavelli, Mandragola, 1.2 (16).

^[15] Mansfield, “Cuckold,” 1.

^[16] See Plato, “The Apology of Socrates,” in Four Texts on Socrates, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 31d. See also Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 496d.

^[17] See Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, vol. 34, Études Rabelaisiennes (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1997), 194.

^[18] See, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 2nd, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3.13–16.

^[19] Machiavelli, Prince, 3.9; 7.30.

^[20] See Rabelais, The Complete Works of François Rabelais, 3–18. For more on Rabelais’s connections to Italy, see R. A. Cooper, “Rabelais et l’Italie: Les lettres écrites de Rome, 1535–1536,” Cahiers de l’Association international des études francaises 30 (1978): 23–39; Arthur Heulhard, Rabelais, Ses Voyages en Italie, Son Exil à Metz (Paris: 1891).

^[21] Willis Bowen, “Sixteenth Century French Translations of Machiavelli,” Italica 27 (1978): 313.

^[22] Gary Ianziti, “Rabelais and Machiavelli,” Romance Notes 16 (1975): 463.

^[23] Voltaire, “Lettres à S. A. Mgr. le Prince dexxx sur Rabelais,” in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1877–1885), XXVI, 470: Rabelais “meant to protect himself beneath the mask of folly; he makes this clearly enough understood himself in his prologue.” Quoted in Donald Frame, François Rabelais: A Study (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 175.

^[24] The chapters that I exclude from analysis comprise attempts to interpret the marriage question through the following means: through dice, lots, dreams, and through consultation with the Sybil of Panzoust, the mute Goatsnose, the poet Raminagrobis, Épistemon, Herr Trippa, and Frère Jean. These chapters offer the same teaching as the official consultations do. I focus on the banquet consultations because they are central to the book and are orchestrated by Pantagruel.

^[25] Plato, Republic, 511d.

This excerpt is from Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy. Our review of the book is here.

Print