(From Rob, who expressed a particular interest in “saucy anecdotes about what Rabelais did in his spare time”. Not sure if I can deliver that, but here you are anyway…)
Life stories, books and links
Wikipedia biography
Short biography (Catholic Encyclopaedia)
Another biography (and another)
Francois Rabelais (French)
Rabelais (French)
Les grands auteurs francais du Moyen-Age
Biography, texts
Bibliography
Rabelais and Montaigne bibliography
Grotesque bibliography
Bakhtin bibliography
Excerpts from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world
Bakhtin and his world
Rabelais’ carnivalesque
On Pantagruelism
The carnival model
Stephen Greenblatt on Rabelais and carnival
Rabelais’ language
Rabelais et la renaissance
Natalie Zemon Davis on Rabelais and his critics
Bruegel, ‘Battle of Carnival and Lent’
Rabelais and… cannabis (?!)
Wikipedia outline of Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gargantua and Pantagruel (English) (scroll down slightly for the list)
Pantagruel (French)
Letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel
4 comments on “Christmas requests: Rabelais”
Aha! An interesting bunch, and suitable distraction from suitcase mayhem. The Zemon Davies pdf is particularly interesting, and the cannabis one suitably bizarre!
Many thanks, I shall scan them for sauciness later
ALthough, as a one-time wikipediholic driven off by people revising my entries for being incorrect (these would be entries on the friggin’ Carolingians, BTW), I always like to remind people that the Wikipedia can be both very good and very bad, depending on how willing people are to keep an eye on their areas of expertise. I wouldn’t trust anything on areas that have at times been Polish and German, for example. The debates those particular partisans get into are hugely ugly.
It’s a given when I do these lists that I haven’t spent hours checking them out and you’ll have to do that for yourselves, right? (Still, should I more routinely include a note to that effect?) There seem to be particular issues with Wikipedia, but they can be excellent so they seem worth including when I come across them.
I think that’s my problem with it. I hate that there is some really good stuff on it, but am very leery of sending my students there. I have to say, though, that the article on my favourite f-word has gone from the good thing I wrote and Cranky Professor edited to an even better thing (after some edit wars), after I stopped contributing.