Rabelais S Contempt For Fortune

Francois Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel at the height of the Renaissance, when top-caliber thinkers aimed to unite the best of freshly rediscovered ancient Greco-Roman theory and practice and transform politics. Through his work, Rabelais offers his unique understanding of ancient philosophy and political thought. This book considers the role of fortune as the key to understanding Rabelais, much in the manner of contemporaries such as Machiavelli. The two could not be more different, however. Throughout his writings, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess Fortuna through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Rabelais’s headstrong character Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await. Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction, given in chapter 25 of The Prince, to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme 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.

Although he writes in a different genre than most other political thinkers, Francois Rabelais's contribution to political philosophy carries weight because of his famous humor and unique style, which provide sharp insight into the limits of human agency and throw doubt on the more "serious" projects of his peers.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is a pentalogy of novels which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The book is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence.

The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

The documents in this collection trace the course of the Renaissance in Italy and northern Europe, describing the emergence of a vibrant and varied intellectual and artistic culture in various states, cities, and kingdoms. Voices of the Renaissance: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life contains excerpts from 52 different documents relating to the period of European history known as the Renaissance. In the 14th century, the rise of humanism, a philosophy based on the study of the languages, literature, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, led to a sense of revitalization and renewal among the city-states of northern Italy. The political development and economic expansion of those cities provided the ideal conditions for humanist scholarship to flourish. This period of literary, artistic, architectural, and cultural flowering is today known as the Renaissance, a term taken from the French and meaning "rebirth." The Italian Renaissance reached its height in the 15th and early 16th centuries. In the 1490s, the ideals of the Italian Renaissance spread north of the Alps and gave rise to a series of national cultural rebirths in various states. In many places, this Northern Renaissance extended into the 17th century, when war and religious discord put an end to the Renaissance era.