ABSTRACT
The introduction of Christian references into the storm-at-sea episode was not an isolated act. The Quart Livre widened the power and scope of Christian laughter by marrying Æsop and Lucian to specific scriptural texts. In that way the Christian religion, and the Christian God, could be introduced into fables, not merely inferred from the moral at the end. Calcagnini was the greatest Christian mythographer of his age. By the time Rabelais had completed the Quart Livre he had absorbed much of Calcagnini's erudition as well as his concept of moral mythography, and had even started calling his own writings mythologies. The advantage of introducing Christian authorities into Lucianesque and Æsop fables is that one can, as here, have a silly, bumbling, irascible, overworked Jupiter in the fable, yet apply the moral directly to the Christian relationship to the true God.
