Rabelais, Renaissance, and Reformation: Recent French Works on the Renaissance

The Renaissance is Protean, forcing us to fix it with descriptive labels or bracket it with interpretive structures in order to make any sense of it. Recent works on Rabelais—himself a shifting and many faceted figure—not only illustrate this tendency but also illuminate the need for new interpretative models of the French Renaissance. Whereas some of these works attempt to fix Rabelais with the “humanist/humanism” label, others attempt to bracket him with post-modern interpretative structures, generally blending phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism. And whereas some of these works unwittingly reveal the poverty of their interpretive frameworks, others point the way toward a new one that takes Rabelais's own cultural milieu more seriously.