Gargantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart's View of Rabelais (Studies in the Humanities)

Johann Fischart, translator/adapter of Gargantua, is one of the few near-contemporaries whose reaction to Rabelais is known. However, with its massive word-lists, puns and neologisms, Fischart's Geschichtklitterung is virtually inaccessible. Whereas most scholars have treated this work as a linguistic document essential in the evolution of the vernacular, the present study is designed to open up Fischart's text with its variety of meanings to readers interested in the development of humanism, and to answer the questions of Rabelais scholars on how and why Fischart interpreted and altered the original text. This monograph places Fischart in his cultural, political, religious and literary milieu, between the French and German civilizations as they were perceived in Strassburg at the end of the 16th century.