Francesco Petrarch, who was born in 1304 and died in 1374, and Giovanni Boccaccio, who was born in 1313 and died in 1375, hoped to find something they knew very little about although they believed it was important and beautiful. This was the great tradition of Latin and especially Greek Classical literature that was referred to in a few texts they knew but that existed in very few actual examples. There were synopses of The Iliad and The Odyssey, but no texts of the complete poems. There were a few letters of Cicero that referred to many more that were lost—or perhaps not, Petrarch and Boccaccio thought. One or two Greek plays had come down in obviously very corrupt editions, but there were hints that many more could be found. And the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle were somewhere, because certain Arabic philosophers were said to know about them, but the Italians could no more read Arabic than they could read Greek, and these hints were simply not good enough.
Some things they did know, one of which was that in the Classical world that fascinated them because of its remoteness and mystery it had been the custom to crown poets with laurel leaves. Petrarch was a poet and a very good one, and he suggested to Boccaccio that they ought to find a way to crown him as poet laureate of the “new” world. This was arranged, Petrarch was crowned on the Capitol at Rome, and he then laid the crown at the marble feet of St. Peter in his great church. This ceremony was big news. But the lack of ancient texts was still a serious problem. Petrarch and Boccaccio together traveled around Italy, searching in the archives of old monasteries for any texts that might be lying around and unreadable by the monks themselves. In this way they discovered many of Cicero’s letters that were important not so much because of what they said but because of the Latin in which they were written. It was quite different from the Latin of the Church, the language priests spoke and in which they celebrated mass. And so Petrarch, especially, began to try to write in this old Latin. But the very few examples of Greek were still unreadable.
This remained the fact for nearly a century after the deaths of our two wily and hopeful Italians, despite unremitting efforts on the part of others to seek out ancient manuscripts written on parchment that was very much the worse for wear. But in the year 1453 everything changed, and in a sense the Renaissance began.
What brought it about was a tragic event, from a Christian point of view. For centuries the city of Constantinople had remained as the capital of what was left of the Roman Empire, but it was situated in a part of the world that was surrounded on all sides by Ottoman Turks. In that fateful year the Turks finally captured Byzantium, as the city had been called for centuries, renamed it Istanbul, and celebrated by praying in the great basilica of Hagia Sophia, at the time the largest church not only in Christendom but also in the world.
For weeks and months before the city’s fall refugees had begun to flee the city and travel westward. Many of them were scholars and most of them read and spoke Greek as their native language. And they carried with them priceless manuscripts written not on parchment but on paper, which Muslims had been using for centuries unbeknownst to Christians in the West and which, among other things, was much easier to transport. Of course the refugees came first to Italy bearing their priceless treasures: complete texts of the Homeric poems, of many plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, of the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle. What was at first only a trickle soon became a flood, and our world began to take shape.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
1483?–1553
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais was a doctor and like many of the best doctors he possessed an earthy sense of humor. Doctors, like lawyers, do not usually see us at our best; we are in physical (or legal) trouble when we visit them. The response of many lawyers is to become cynical; the response of many doctors is to become jovial. There is so much pain and so little they can do about it that the only thing to do, they seem to be saying, is to smile. Or even to guffaw—to react with a belly laugh directed at that old bully, the world.
This, at least, is the kind of doctor Rabelais was. He was probably born about 1483 and he took holy orders (he was a Franciscan priest) as well as receiving his doctorate from Montpellier, the best medical school in France. He never conducted a general practice, instead serving as personal physician to several members of the Du Bellay family, one of the most powerful families in France because of its closeness to the king. He possessed a great deal of medical knowledge, which keeps showing up in Gargantua and Pantagruel, the strange, wonderful book to which he devoted the last half of his life. Of course other kinds of knowledge also appear in the book: medieval versions of geography, astronomy, alchemy, and history, and much Renaissance lore as well. Rabelais was as cognizant of the new learning as anyone in the France of his time.
But humor, not learning, characterizes this book. Rabelais was one of the funniest men who ever lived; he clearly thought all the basic things that doctors know more about than anyone else are hilariously funny. He knew sex was a great pleasure but he also thought it was vastly amusing; he thought defecation was terribly funny; he thought micturation, breaking wind, and eructation were terribly funny; he even thought death was funny. Nor would he have used any of the pretentious euphemisms that I used in that sentence. He would have said pissing and farting and belching, and in fact he did use those and scores of other funny, weird words for things that are never mentioned in polite society but are nevertheless thought about there just as often as anywhere else. In this respect he was irrepressible. If these graphic words offend you, do not bother to read Rabelais. He is an X-rated author.
You should also not bother to read Rabelais if you believe that alcohol, instead of being one of God’s greatest gifts, is the bane of man’s existence. For Rabelais was a drinker and a lover of drinkers, and after laughter he surely thought that wine was the sovereign remedy for the ills of the world. Everyone in Gargantua and Pantagruel (except a few churlish priests) drinks all the time, and a great deal. If at any time they are not drinking this is probably because they are eating, which they also do frequently and in large quantities. Rabelais is the patron of all societies of eaters and drinkers, especially in France, and that is as it should be, for if you are going to eat and drink excessively you might as well have fun doing it, and Rabelais had fun doing everything.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is in five books, written over a period of twenty or thirty years. Book Two was composed before Book One, a fact that mostly concerns scholars. Together, Books One and Two are about the jovial, benevolent giant Gargantua and his equally enormous and good-hearted son, Pantagruel. In Book One Gargantua receives several different educations, and you can choose among them. First, he is “educated” by the puppies and kittens in his father’s barn. Then he is given a medieval education by Master Tubal Holofernes, but this is soon followed by the Renaissance education administered by the scholar Ponocrates. The latter is demanding, but he provides the kind of humanistic education that survived in good colleges until quite recently. It includes, by the way, a lot of physical exercise, which helps to distinguish it from Holofernes’ regimen, which takes place entirely indoors with the lads bent over dusty tomes.