The Wisdom of the Renaissance by Michael K. Kellogg

Author:Michael K. Kellogg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2019-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

LIFE

François Rabelais was born in Chinon, a town in the Loire Valley that played an often pivotal role in the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, though it is known today mostly for its medieval castle and its Cabernet Franc wine. Rabelais likely was born in 1483, the same year as Martin Luther. His father, Antoine, was a prominent lawyer and modest landowner.

Rabelais and his two brothers must have received a good education, though little is known of the specifics. His school friends, Jean and Guillaume du Bellay and Geoffroy d’Estissac, achieved considerable prominence—Jean and Geoffroy as bishops, and Guillaume as a statesman—and they would prove invaluable patrons in his later life.

Rabelais studied law at some point before joining the Franciscan monastery in Fontenay-le-Comte in 1510 or 1511. It was an odd choice for one who—despite his protestations—burned a great deal of midnight oil studying Latin and Greek and eventually Hebrew so that he could read the Bible and the classics in their original languages. The Franciscans—a mendicant order founded by Francis of Assisi—were indifferent if not actively hostile to education. They favored the spirit and were suspicious of intellect as inclined to lead one astray.11

While Rabelais toiled in the monastery, François I became king of France in 1515. He continued the “Italian Wars” of his predecessors, even capturing and controlling Milan for a time. But the cultural conquest ran the other way, with ideas from the Italian Renaissance pouring into France, starting, of course, with Petrarch and continuing through the three-year residence of Leonardo da Vinci at the court of François I in Amboise. François was an active patron of Renaissance artists and writers. It is said that the king himself cradled Leonardo’s head in his arms as he died. Horace’s words about Greece and Rome could readily be applied to Italy and France: “Captive Greece took its Roman captor captive, / Invading uncouth Latium with its arts.”12 Without this prolonged invasion of Italian arts and letters into France, neither Rabelais nor Montaigne—the twin crowns of the French Renaissance—would have been possible.

Yet it was a northerner, Erasmus, who exercised the most direct influence on Rabelais. In a famous letter, Rabelais wrote to Erasmus: “Whatever I am and am worth, I have received from you alone.”13 In religion, Rabelais advocated the same significant reforms urged by Erasmus. His sympathies lay with a group known in France as the Evangelicals, who believed in the primacy of the scriptures, which should be read whenever possible in their original languages but otherwise in accurate vernacular translations. The Evangelicals rejected the Latin (Vulgate) Bible and the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of biblical interpretation. Each man and woman, they urged, should read and meditate directly upon the word of God without the mediation of clerics.

Rabelais and the Evangelicals were also hostile to the sale of indulgences, monasticism, the worship of saints and their relics, and the making of pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. They believed only in the sacraments mentioned

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