A Treasure Hunt in French Renaissance Books

My field of specialization is 16th-century French literature. I focus on the prose works of François Rabelais, which I read from the perspectives of rhetoric and stylistics. Rabelais's works are often described as "popular." This is likely due to the significant influence of Mikhail Bakhtin's criticism, but in fact, we know that Rabelais was close to the influential figures of his time, both in his birth and upbringing and in his professional environment. Rabelais was active in the first half of the 16th century, an era that saw the invention of gunpowder, the compass, and letterpress printing, and the latter half of the century was marked by the intensification of the Wars of Religion. In an age when politics and religion were closely intertwined, being close to powerful people naturally led to writing works that deeply reflected these current affairs. Therefore, deciphering his works involves investigating the movements of people—such as the power dynamics of contemporary influential figures, their control structures, the composition and evolution of factions, opportunities for contact with other groups, and even exile abroad and espionage activities—and cross-referencing this with the period when the works were written. Exploring the meaning of the texts based on the few surviving documents and previous research is a truly thrilling experience.

From the beginning of my research, I have been interested in Rabelais's "way of writing." My research began with the question of what this writing style was all about, with its multiple overlapping episodes in the middle of the story and its long lists of fictitious book titles and food names. As I searched for the sources of his forms and motifs, I discovered that his bizarre and fantastical stories, interspersed with "carnivalesque" descriptions, incorporated not only works written in and outside of France during the same period but also a multitude of phenomena that arise from culture, thought, and human life, such as ancient Greek and Roman stories, myths, hagiographies, and folklore. I also realized that his methods for presenting them were far from straightforward. It seems that arranging existing materials in one's own way to create a "mythology" (mythologie) and presenting it to one's contemporaries was one of the activities carried out by intellectuals known as humanists. Thus, highly encrypted texts were created, based on the endlessly deep and rich erudition of the era that produced Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, and Guillaume Budé. Using rhetoric and stylistics as a decoding grid, I hope to learn from the texts these masters of erudition and intellectual giants wrote at the risk of their lives, to understand how they tackled the social issues of their time and how they perceived human endeavors.

In recent years, I have been interested in the connection between literature and the visual arts, and I have been reading descriptive texts. I often travel to France to investigate the interactions between people and the influential relationships between works, based on the humanist circles and friendships of the time. This involves examining surviving books, prints, and buildings, as well as participating in academic conferences. My research subject is from about 500 years ago, but there are still undiscovered things remaining, so the treasure hunt never ends. I interact with researchers from various countries, gaining old and new insights, while thinking about the "mythology" (mythologie) of the 16th century and of our modern times.