Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune

Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune PDF

Author: Timothy Haglund

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-11-19

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1498575463

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Francois Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel at the height of the Renaissance, when top-caliber thinkers aimed to unite the best of freshly rediscovered ancient Greco-Roman theory and practice and transform politics. Through his work, Rabelais offers his unique understanding of ancient philosophy and political thought. This book considers the role of fortune as the key to understanding Rabelais, much in the manner of contemporaries such as Machiavelli. The two could not be more different, however. Throughout his writings, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess Fortuna through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Rabelais’s headstrong character Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await. Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction, given in chapter 25 of The Prince, to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme may beat him. Through this dramatization, Panurge begins to hear the merits of viewing fortune as an intractable part of life that must be shouldered with the proper inner disposition rather than as an object susceptible of human conquest.

Rabelais's Contempt for Fortune

Rabelais's Contempt for Fortune PDF

Author: Timothy Haglund

Publisher: Politics, Literature, & Film

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9781498575478

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Although he writes in a different genre than most other political thinkers, Francois Rabelais's contribution to political philosophy carries weight because of his famous humor and unique style, which provide sharp insight into the limits of human agency and throw doubt on the more "serious" projects of his peers.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua and Pantagruel PDF

Author: Francois Rabelais

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2006-10-26

Total Pages: 1088

ISBN-13: 0141935782

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The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

Voices of the Renaissance

Voices of the Renaissance PDF

Author: John A. Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-02-04

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1440876045

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The documents in this collection trace the course of the Renaissance in Italy and northern Europe, describing the emergence of a vibrant and varied intellectual and artistic culture in various states, cities, and kingdoms. Voices of the Renaissance: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life contains excerpts from 52 different documents relating to the period of European history known as the Renaissance. In the 14th century, the rise of humanism, a philosophy based on the study of the languages, literature, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, led to a sense of revitalization and renewal among the city-states of northern Italy. The political development and economic expansion of those cities provided the ideal conditions for humanist scholarship to flourish. This period of literary, artistic, architectural, and cultural flowering is today known as the Renaissance, a term taken from the French and meaning "rebirth." The Italian Renaissance reached its height in the 15th and early 16th centuries. In the 1490s, the ideals of the Italian Renaissance spread north of the Alps and gave rise to a series of national cultural rebirths in various states. In many places, this Northern Renaissance extended into the 17th century, when war and religious discord put an end to the Renaissance era.

Virgil and Renaissance Culture

Virgil and Renaissance Culture PDF

Author: L. B. T. Houghton

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 9782503581903

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Brings together studies by scholars from a range of academic disciplines to assess the central position of Virgil in the intellectual, artistic, and political lives of the Renaissance. This collection of essays presents a variety of case studies of Virgils impact on different branches of Renaissance culture, covering the crucial areas of education and court culture, the visual arts, music history, philosophy, and Neo-Latin and vernacular literature. It brings together established scholars and younger researchers from a range of different academic disciplines. The studies included here will be of particular interest to students of Renaissance social, intellectual, and literary history, to art historians, and to those working on the reception of classical literature; some offer new perspectives on well-known material, while others investigate examples of Renaissance engagement with the Virgilian corpus which have received little or no previous attention. Building on recent scholarship on the Virgilian tradition, the collection opens up new avenues for research on the reception of both Virgil and other classical authors, and addresses questions of fundamental importance to historians of this period not least the perennial debate over the nature and definition of the Renaissance itself.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua and Pantagruel PDF

Author: Francois Rabelais

Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 1003

ISBN-13:

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Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, was first published in the mid sixteenth century. A work of satirical and fantasy fiction, it tells the story, over 5 books, of two giants; Gargantua and his son Pantagruel as they travel through various lands. On their travels, they meet people on Tool Island, who are so fat, they slit their skin to let the fat puff out; the sexually prolific Semiquavers; the Furred Law-Cats, who imprison them; and, the Chitterlings, who attack them. Containing much vulgarity and wordplay, it was viewed as obscene by some, and treated with suspicion during a social age of religious oppression.

Gargantua & Pantagruel

Gargantua & Pantagruel PDF

Author: François Rabelais

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-11-13

Total Pages: 1173

ISBN-13:

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Gargantua and Pantagruel is a pentalogy of novels which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The book is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence.

Reason’s Inquisition

Reason’s Inquisition PDF

Author: Christopher A. Colmo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1666921963

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Reason’sInquisition is an exploration in the literature of political philosophy before and after Alfarabi and ranging from Thucydides to Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. These studies, most of them previously unpublished, open inquiries into (1) theory and practice, (2) reason and revelation, and (3) the relation between thinkers ancient and modern. Readers may be surprised to see the Platonist Alfarabi presented as a critic of Plato’s theory in the name of practice, while Alfarabi and Hobbes are shown to have a common interest in a theory commensurate with action. Strauss, Voegelin and Lucien Febvre all explore the problem of reason and revelation in relation to the limits of human knowledge. An ambitious study of Shakespeare’s Macbeth explores the ambiguity of both nature and knowledge in relation to male and female, good and evil, present and future. The contrast between ancients and moderns is explicit in studies of the modern aspects of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and of Rousseau’s reversal of Plato. Kierkegaard and Heidegger bring radical modernity into focus against a Platonic background in the closing essay. These diverse essays attempt to follow the thinkers and themes explored in turning a critical gaze upon reason itself.