ABSTRACT
In 1538 the learned printer and publisher Etienne Dolet issued a remarkable eulogy of François Rabelais, whose first two books he was to publish in 1542: Pantagruel (originally published in 1532), and Gargantua (originally published in 1534). The speaker is the corpse of an executed criminal, who looks back in melancholy at his wicked life and well-earned execution in the form of a prosopopoeia (a figure of speech in which an inanimate thing is personified). His only consolation is that his body will be made available to science: he will be dissected by Rabelais, who was a prominent medical practitioner and personal physician of Cardinal Jean du Bellay at the time.1
