PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

CHAPTER 3
Humanism, narrative fiction and philosophy in Pierre Boaistuau’s work
This is how François Rabelais described his enthusiasm for the recovery of ancient
learning in his time, through the words of Gargantua’s letter to his son Pantagruel:
Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored:
Greek – without which it is a disgrace that any man should call himself a
scholar – Hebrew, Chaldaean, Latin; elegant and accurate books are now in
use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration
[…] The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned
teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold that it was not
as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now. 390
The study of classical languages, the availability of more accurate texts than before
because of the invention of printing, the birth of new libraries and a general tendency
toward learning, were some of the features that characterised the learning fervour and
intellectual transformations of the sixteenth century. Scholarship has identified them
within the wide context of Renaissance humanism. But what does this term mean?
How did it manifest itself in France? And in what ways was it embodied in Pierre
Boaistuau’s work? These are some of the main questions addressed in this chapter.
As with all formulations of ideas and movements in historical research, the
Renaissance cannot be explained in its entirety since it is an abstract form. It should
not be understood as a homogenous cultural expression but rather as an expression of
different features and thought processes within a varied context of cultural exchange:
Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and endings and consistent
content in between, the Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen
as a movement of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable
390 Rabelais, F. (tr. M. A. Screech), Gargantua and Pantagruel (London, 2006), p. 47.
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