Gargantua and Pantagruel

Originally titled Gargantua et Pantagruel, this five-volume novel was written over more than thirty years by the French Renaissance author François Rabelais. It is regarded as one of the key sources of the French novel and as a literary "encyclopedia" of Renaissance humanist thought. The narrative follows three generations of giant kings—Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Gargantua's son Pantagruel. The first two books recount Gargantua's extraordinary birth and upbringing, his studies in Paris, and the great deeds of father and son, contrasting old and new approaches to education to set out humanist ideas about learning, human nature, and knowledge. The last three books follow Pantagruel and his companions, including Panurge, as they sail across the seas and travel through many lands to resolve a question about marriage and to seek the source of wisdom, the "Divine Bottle," unfolding a vast panorama of French social life from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The language is boisterous and exuberant, the plot absurd and exaggerated, and the text interspersed with folk legends, comic tales, puns, and pedantic mock debates. Amid the laughter it sharply satirizes the hypocrisy and darkness of the feudal order and the Church, attacks the harm done to children by scholastic education, and affirms the value of the body, desire, intelligence, and creativity. This edition is Chen Xiaoqing's complete translation from the French original, with the text in five parts and including a translator's preface, a list of principal characters, and "To the Reader."