FOLLY AND WISDOM, STYLE
AND SUBSTANCE, DESPAIR
AND HOPE ALTERNATE IN THE HU-
MANIST WORKS OF ERASMUS, CAS-
TIGLIONE, AND MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE;
WITH FRANÇOIS RABELAIS THE SAME POWER-
ful humanist concerns are buried in a copious language generated by an un-
quenchable love of learning. "Rabelais plays with words as children do with
pebbles," Anatole France writes of his Renaissance predecessor; "He piles them
up into heaps." ¹ Rabelais's irresistible taste for humanist copia is a direct
consequence of enormous energies, of fiercely unlimited thought, and of un-
bounded vitality that move him and his gigantic singular novel far beyond the
deliberately more concentrated and focused Lucian poetics of Erasmus, or the
Ciceronian poetics of Castiglione, to something akin to Marguerite's Plotinian
interests in being and becoming. Unlike Marguerite, however, Rabelais is a
man of many diverse parts and of a complicating rather than a unifying vision.
He is a textual scholar (like Erasmus) who translated Book 2 of Herodotus's
fabulous Historia, prepared an edition of Giovanni Manardi's detailed Latin
letters on medicine (for which he composed a Latin preface), and edited his own
volume of Hippocrates' scientific Aphorisms, based on his medical lectures at
Montpellier; yet he also stoutly remains a novelist who, like his three Conti-
nental predecessors, keeps confronting what Mary E. Raglund calls "an uncer-
tain and cryptic universe. ² The bibliographer's precision and the mystic's
propensity for the ineffable are both encompassed in the sweep of his prose
fiction. Both are exposed and central to his characteristically ebullient passages,
with their stacks of words and accretive phrases that always hover near repeti-

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