Rethinking the New Medievalism

14. Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance: The Case of Rabelais

c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance The Case of Rabelais d e b o r a h n . l o s s e In his contribution to The New Medievalism, Giuseppe Mazzotta comments that “Renaissance scholars . . . have long been aware of how blurred the dividing line between ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ culture is.”1 And yet, Rabelais, with references to le temps . . . tenebreux (the dark time), the age of the “infélicité et calamité des Gothz” (the infelicity and calamity of the Goths), invites us to partition the old from the new.2 Contemporary scholars, as distinct from our nineteenth-century counterparts, approach such partitioning mindful of the limitations of categorization (46). Stephen G. Nichols has contrasted the methodology of the nineteenth-century scholars who established the field of medieval study with contemporary methodology . With the discipline’s early focus on philology, literary historians such as Émile Littré focused on le dit—the said, the historically determinate “fact and artifact.”3 In the past twenty years, scholars have focused on le dire—the speech act in context—with special attention to the relationship between enunciating subject and the audience (31). Writing as he did at the dawn of what we call the French Renaissance, Rabelais encouraged us to believe that his pedagogical project dismissed the work of scholasticism and the Church fathers, and yet he masked the influence of the Church fathers such as Saint Augustine in his pedagogical and devotional project. To better understand major portions of Gargantua and the Tiers Livre, we need to return to the works of Saint Augustine, and in particular, to the Confessions to see the relationship between the believer and the interlocutor, in this case God. Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance 237 The emergence of printing and the consequent anxiety between the writing subject and the new and changing audience brought with it a growing consciousness of the speech act as it unfolds within the triple domain of the sender, the receiver, and the context.4 The nineteenth-century scholars who undertook the study of medieval texts from a philological viewpoint did not have access to the broad theoretical writings on the history of printing that have so informed the work of medieval and early modern scholars of the late twentieth century: the works of Paul Zumthor, Michel Zink, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet for the Middle Ages and François Rigolot, Terence Cave, and Michel Jeanneret for the Renaissance, among others. By silencing the name of Saint Augustine in his work and so openly attacking scholastic pedagogy and scholarship, Rabelais conceals a potential key to understanding both essential portions of the sequence on the Abbaye de Thél ème and on the plight of Panurge. Taking the text as fact or artifact without exploring intertextual connections with the Confessions and other writings by Saint Augustine, literary historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, sniffing Rabelais’s proverbial marrow bone, failed to detect the scent of the Church fathers and explored what they judged to be more fruitful tracks: Platonism, disbelief, reform ideology, humanist pedagogy. What R. Howard Bloch has said for the Middle Ages is equally true for reform-minded authors of the early modern period: “if I had to indicate a specific direction in which medieval theory might make the greatest impact not only in the understanding of medieval literature but on modern thought as well, it would be in the return to the master theoreticians of the Middle Ages, the Church fathers, a return which, already underway, signals one of the essential directions of contemporary medieval studies.”5 Paul Oskar Kristeller foreshadowed Bloch’s observation about the importance of the Church fathers throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when in 1941 he alerts us to the persistent influence of Saint Augustine from the Middle Ages into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “The Augustinian undercurrent in theology and philosophy continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the popular religious literature continued to show Augustine’s influence.”6 Following on Kristeller’s thoughts, the present study aims not at establishing a one-to-one correlation between Rabelais’s reading and individual works of Saint Augustine but showing how much Augustine’s thought had shaped late medieval and early humanist thinking as exemplified in the works of François Rabelais. The evangelical reform of which Rabelais...