Livres de haulte gresse: Bibliographic Myth from Rabelais to Du Bartas

Few books before Pantagruel and Gargantua were as saturated with bookishness and the consciousness of what makes a book. Rabelais's narrator, Alcofrybas Nasier, and his other characters often unwittingly burlesque the mannerisms and pretensions characteristic of book-consciousness in the 1530s. Gérard Defaux and others have written convincingly of the satirical program behind Rabelais's depiction of sophistry and related excesses of the learned world in his time.¹ Burlesque, however, is not necessarily satire. Underneath and alongside the satire of sophistry, Rabelais's first two books reveal a vein of idealistic, even utopian attitudes toward books as vehicles for the transmission of culture and wisdom. This bookish idealism can be treacherous for critics: on the one hand, it can look deceptively like satire, causing us to mistake Renaissance irony, with its skeptical ambiguity, for the simplistic negations of modern irony. But, conversely, to ignore the element of burlesque and play is to misconstrue Rabelaisian seriousness as sobersided and sententious.²

Rabelais and his humanist contemporaries were indeed heirs to a long tradition of idealistic discourse about books. Their idealism and that of the previous generation had been intensified by the advent of printing, which seemed to make possible a vast increase in the benefits brought by books. As Floyd Gray comments regarding the Librairie de Saint-Victor (Pantagruel, chapter 7): "le chapitre tout entier semble pivoter sur l'idée d'une tension, voire d'une opposition entre livres manuscrits, reliques d'une culture périmée, et livres imprimés, promesse de renouvellement et de 'librairies très amples.'" Gray is certainly right to remark that "derrière le 'réel' de Saint-Victor, on voit poindre le réel du monde naissant de l'imprimerie et la crise que ce nouvel art va entraîner dans la réproduction des livres."³ However, the age of Rabelais was still capable of idealistic enthusiasm for printing; like humanistic philology, printing was useful above all for preserving the heritage of the ancients, both Classical and Judeo-Christian. If the early sixteenth century revered the printing press, it did so not only or primarily because printing was an "agent of change," as Elizabeth Eisenstein has called it, but also because mechanical multiplication of copies represented the most powerful means yet found for preserving the integrity of ancient texts.⁴ In terms that were familiar to Rabelais and his contemporaries, the printing-press represented a powerful new weapon in the ongoing struggle of memoria literarum against the forces of obliteratio. At a time when the total number of books had increased manyfold in about eighty years, and when some revered Latin and Greek classics now existed in several hundred or even several thousand copies, the danger of loss was certainly felt less acutely than before Gutenberg. Yet hope was still tinged with wariness, for anyone seriously involved with books knew how close several venerated authors had come to total erasure or definitive mutilation. Even today, when books number in the billions, we are still keenly susceptible to the pathos of the rare or unique copy and to any form of mass biblioclasm: the destruction of the libraries of Sarajevo and Baghdad and the burning of the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, like book-burnings by fascists or fundamentalists, affect us in somewhat the same way as plague, murder, or genocide.⁵

The struggle against obliteratio was already sharpening a century and more before Gutenberg. In the generation before Petrarch, the love of books was eloquently described by Richard of Bury (d. 1345) in his Philobiblon,⁶ but by the early 1400's, bibliophilia began inspiring book-hunting on an unprecedented scale. Like Richard, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, their humanistic heirs became avid book-hunters, and restored texts to circulation that had hitherto been neglected or available only in fragmentary form.⁷ These discoveries increased the known output of several esteemed authors, and some book-hunters recovered unique exemplars of texts that, in another ten or twenty years of neglect or concealment, might have been lost forever. Discussing his recovery of a...