ABSTRACT
The Cent nouvelles nouvelles is a compendium of narrative genres. It also catalogues millennial modes of thinking about masculinity in relation to early-modern marriage. The detailed examination of this text that the author has just undertaken provides a narrative context within which one could analyze Rabelais's major work on masculinity, the Tiers Livre. The Tiers Livre is thus ultimately 'about' the relation between rhetoric and the construction of masculinity as an intertextual phenomenon, or masculinity as a topos that generates texts and their interpretations. According to Huchon, the Tiers Livre represents Rabelais's participation in many of the important debates of the Renaissance, which was given a decisive impetus by Erasmus's re-reading of Classical literature. Huchon implies that the primary subject matter of the text, marriage and the social implications of men's relations to women were only of minor importance when compared to the primary Pauline and Evangelical message of the work.
