Gargantua and PantagruelFrançois Rabelais

Rabelais published Gargantua and Pantagruel in installments between 1532 and 1564, beginning with the son and then going back for the father. The books follow a dynasty of giants through birth, education, war, and a sea voyage, written in an inventory prose that piles up games, oaths, insults, and library catalogues until the list itself is the joke.

Two set pieces carry the humanist program. Gargantua's letter to Pantagruel at Paris prescribes Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, natural history, and Scripture, and orders the son to become an abyss of knowledge. It stands against the sophists who had earlier spent years teaching Gargantua to recite his alphabet backwards. The Abbey of Thélème, founded as a reward after the war with Picrochole, has a single rule, do what thou wilt, resting on the argument that men well born and well bred carry an instinct that drives them toward virtue and away from vice.

The Third Book turns the whole apparatus on one question: should Panurge marry. He consults dice, dreams, a sibyl, a dying poet, a theologian, a physician, a philosopher, a judge who settles his cases by throwing dice, and a professional fool. Every consultation ends where it began. The Fourth and Fifth Books put the company to sea after the Oracle of the Bottle.

Adler cites Rabelais under Education, Man, Desire, Law, Medicine, Religion, and Wisdom. The satire burlesques scholastic method rather than refuting it, which is why it sits beside sober argument in so many chapters.