ABSTRACT
Gargantua and Pantagruel are two giants, father and son respectively, featured in the fictional works of French Renaissance writer, monk, and physician François
Rabelais (c. 1494-1553). Their adventures are renowned for extreme consumption of food and wine, for jollity, for extraordinary tall-tale exaggerations, and for a philosophy encouraging the embracing of the pleasures of life, good companionship chief among them. These works have been put on the Roman Catholic Church’s Index of Banned Books, have been widely appreciated by royalty and cardinals, and some scholars have seen in them esoteric philosophical wisdom hidden amid the apparent oral, anal, and genital fascinations of its author. The adjective “gargantuan” has come into the English language to signify anything enormous, but terms deriving from Pantagruel have been less widespread. Rabelais himself, in his “Author’s Preface to the Fourth Book of the Adventures of Pantagruel,” defines “pantagruelism” as “a certain gaiety of spirit, pickled in a disdain for fortuitous things” (Oeuvres, 826).
