Abstract
Rabelais’s utopia, the Abbey of Thélème, is a model of restrictiveness and exclusivity, off-limits to the greater part of mankind. Even before it is built, Frère Jan excludes the poor, the sick, the old, the homeless, the illiterate, and even the irascible. Women are permitted but, he explains, they must be “belles, bien formées, bien naturées” and the men likewise, “beaux, bien formés et bien naturés — beautiful, well-formed and good-natured.1 All the inhabitants, we learn,
had been so well educated that there wasn’t one among them who could not read, write, sing, play on harmonious instruments, speak five or six languages, and write easy poetry and clear prose in any and all of them.2
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Notes
François Rabelais, Gargantua in Rabelais Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris: Gamier, 1962), p. 190.
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 124.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 121.
A. I. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1988), p. 131.
Charles V. Langlois, “Les Merveilles du Prêtre Jean” in La Vie en France au Moyen Age, v. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1927), pp. 45–46 (my translation).
John R. Hale, Age of Exploration (New York: Time Incorporated, 1966), p. 32.
Langlois, op. cit., p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 156–57.
Ibid., p. 164.
Ibid., p. 167.
The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. 115.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), p. 55.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, ed. M. Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1934), p. 115, pp 153–63.
John Prest, The Garden of Eden (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1981), p. 4.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., p. 31 (see also Morrison).
S. E. Morrison, Admiral of the Ocean: A Life of Christopher Columbus, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1942), II, p. 283.
Alfred Beise, The Development of the Feeling for Nature (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), pp. 147–48.
Geoffroy Atkinson, Les Nouveaux Horizons de la littérature française (Paris: Droz, 1935), p. 160 (my translation).
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., p. 167.
Ibid., p. 22
Prest, op. cit., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., pp. 46–47.
Grace Frank, The Medieval French Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 83.
Ibid., pp. 90–91.
Ibid., p. 190.
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Raffini, C. (1995). The Passion for Place: Medieval and Renaissance Re-Creations of Paradise. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_17
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