ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns with the deliberate inversion of governing masculine figures, and particularly with how that sense of inversion concerns such physical bodies, and the sexual appetites and gluttony attributed to them. In her analysis of early modern English conduct books, Alexandra Shepard writes that 'Lust, drunkenness, anger, and idleness were demonized as particular pitfalls stemming from an incapacity for self-control'. This chapter turns to the texts by Rabelais that, it seems possible to argue, were likely to have influenced the imagery of the Songes drolatiques. It explores the particularity of the Songes drolatiques imagery by comparing it with new, updated editions that appeared in Germany at the end of the sixteenth century and beyond. Further, Weinberg examines the extent to which Fischart could be characterized as a Grobianic author who presents drunkenness and gluttony via negative examples in order to criticize them, but she concludes that he cannot be understood systematically in this way.
