Thought about action: ergon in Gargantua

Abstract

Rabelais’s fictional chronicles communicate thought about action, including about the relationship of action to social status. They explore and test the view, which was widespread in the period, that the actions you undertake in life should be determined by your social status. The notion that certain actions properly characterise different social groups because those groups have distinct functions in society is widely communicated by the term ergon in key ancient Greek texts which Rabelais knew in the original. So ergon provides a way into the wider question of Rabelais’s representation of, and relationship to, social hierarchy. That question, explored here in relation to a key sixteenth-century work, was opened up in relation to key seventeenth-century works by Michael Moriarty’s pioneering Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (1988).

KEYWORDS:

• Rabelais
• Gargantua, action
• social status
• ergon, Moriarty

Rabelais’s fictional chronicles are saturated in thought about social hierarchy. They provide a rich sixteenth-century instance of a relationship—between literature and social hierarchy—that Michael Moriarty identified and examined pioneeringly for the seventeenth century in Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France.¹

One feature of this relationship in Rabelais is his thinking about ergon. Rabelais read about ergon and the associated concept of energeia in key ancient Greek texts. I anglicise the Greek term as ergon because no single English term captures its semantic range. It can denote work (in the sense of activity or product), a task, a function, a role, an activity, an action; its semantic field in Rabelais’s French is that of labeur, travail, vacation, mestier, besogne and cognate verbs.

Rabelais derived from ancient Greek writers, and others, an assumption that for a hierarchy to exist and be maintained, its members must fulfil and adhere to the particular function that they have within it. They cannot choose that function based on personal desire or whim; they cannot swap it for another; it is allocated to them (by God or birth or both); and it is suited to their particular capacity, to their strengths and limitations, not as individuals, but as members of a particular social group. However, if Rabelais asserts this assumption, he also nuances and challenges it, especially in relation to elites.

The main Greek authors to nourish his thinking on ergon are Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle and Galen. Rabelais owned and annotated Greek copies of works not just by Pseudo-Dionysius but also by Plato, Galen and very probably Hesiod.² He also published humanist editions of works by Galen in the original Greek.³

Using the term energeia, Pseudo-Dionysius, the ancient writer who arguably informs most deeply Rabelais’s thinking on hierarchy, outlines the specific tasks undertaken by priests and others within the church hierarchy, and to which they must restrict themselves.⁴ But the notion of specific tasks had long been fundamental to social order in Greek literature that was even older than the Dionysian corpus was usually thought to be. About a millennium before that corpus was written, Hesiod’s Works and Days made its titular ‘works’ or erga the linchpin of a healthy society. The poem makes attitudes to work a key differentiator between healthy and unhealthy societies.

Ergon is grafted onto more complex, multilayered social hierarchies by the twin philosophers in whom Rabelais is steeped, Plato and Aristotle.⁵ For example, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes assigning one function (which he calls ergon) to each social category of person, since that is the most efficient way to ensure that the needs of society as a whole are catered for. To meet the needs for food, housing, and raiment, there should be farmers, builders, weavers and cobblers, plus others to make tools for those groups (carpenters, smiths, other craftsmen), traders to bring in the merchandise, maritime experts to enable the trade and shopkeepers to get the merchandise to people via markets (369d–372a). These functions and those of the rulers are organised into a hierarchy (via the famous myth of the metals divinely forged in the souls of citizens—gold, silver, iron and bronze). The farmers and craftsmen (who are iron and bronze) are discouraged from procreating with those who have gold or silver in their souls (405a–c).

The role of ergon within social hierarchy is explored throughout the Rabelaisian chronicles, including in their Prologues, which repeatedly prime the reader to think about it, for example with the figure of the Diogenes-like author seeking a socially useful wartime role in the Prologue to the Tiers livre. But I focus here on just one book, Gargantua (1534 or 1535), which contains the strongest normative statements about ergon.

The first comes when Gargantua hosts a banquet in honour of his new friend Frère Jean and praises the monk, who has heroically fought off Picrochole’s troops. Gargantua’s Erasmian, anti-monastic speech presents Frère Jean as an exception to the rule that monks are useless. The focus is on verbs and on the functions and activities that those verbs denote. Gargantua (imitating Plutarch and after him Erasmus) presents the monkey as the first term of a simile: ‘Le cinge ne guarde poinct la maison, comme un chien, il ne tire pas l’aroy, comme le beuf, il ne produict ni lait, ne layne, comme la brebis’, and so on.⁶ A stereotypical monk is the second term of the simile:

— Semblablement un moyne (j’entens de ces ocieux moynes) ne laboure, comme le paisant: ne garde le pays, comme homme de guerre: ne guerist les malades, comme le medicin: ne presche ny endoctrine le monde, comme le bon docteur evangelicque et pedagoge: ne porte les commoditez et choses necessaires à la republicque, comme le marchant. Ce est la cause pourquoy de tous sont huez et abhorrys.

— Voyre mais (dist Grandgousier) ilz prient dieu pour nous.

— Rien moins (respondit Gargantua). […] (pp. 110–11; my italics)

Gargantua continues:

— Mais ainsi leurs ayde dieu s’ilz prient pour nous, et non par paour de perdre leurs miches et souppes grasses. Tous vrays Christians, de tous estatz, en tous lieux, en tous temps prient dieu, et l’esperit prie et interpelle pour iceulx: et dieu les prent en grace. Maintenant tel est nostre bon frere Jean. […] Il travaille, il labeure, il defent les opprimez, il conforte les affligez, il subvient es souffreteux, il garde les clous de l’abbaye.

— Je foys (dist le moyne) bien dadvantaige. (p. 111; my italics)

The passage from which these lines are quoted carries normative weight when we consider not just its quasi-Ciceronian style (with connectors, appositives, subordinate clauses and elevated lexis) but also its resonance with elements of Rabelais’s own experience and commitments—as an ex-monk, a supporter of ‘evangelical’ Catholic reform, a physician, and indeed the brother of a merchant.⁷ Gargantua, while reaffirming the ancient and medieval principles according to which (a) different groups derive their social position from their function, and (b) those people without function lack dignity,⁸ rethinks the details. The core medieval trio of praying (clergy), ploughing (peasants) and fighting (nobles)⁹ is disrupted by the insertion of healing (physicians) in third place (in contrast moreover to lawyers, who are absent), by the reallocation of preaching from all priests to reform-minded ones in particular, and by the reallocation of prayer from the clergy (including monks) to everyone, in a socially undifferentiated way (‘de tous estatz’). So, from Gargantua’s view, while the principle of ergon is maintained, what that principle means in contemporary practice is revised. The revising is presented as an effect of the movement of history, since it is a voice from the previous generation (Gargantua’s father Grandgousier) that defends the more traditional allocation of prayer to the clergy. But that objection is swept aside by the more modern Gargantua.

The second assertion in Gargantua of the relation of function to social hierarchy comes just a little later, when Grandgousier berates the pilgrims whom his son Gargantua had earlier accidentally swallowed (in his salad):

— Allez vous en pauvres gens au nom de dieu le createur, lequel vous soit en guide perpetuelle. Et dorenavant ne soyez faciles à ces otieux et inutilles voyages. Entretenez voz familles, travaillez chascun en sa vocation, instruez voz enfans, et vivez comme vous enseigne le bon Apostre sainct Paoul. (p. 123)

Since the pilgrims have just identified themselves as villagers (p. 122),¹⁰ the implied ‘vocations’ are agricultural ones. Whereas the term used in the earliest editions—‘vacation’¹¹—focused squarely on the activity itself, the term ‘vocation’ (in the 1542 edition), which echoes the Pauline passage alluded to (‘vocatione […] vocati […] vocationis’),¹² grounds those social functions theologically as ones ordained by God for each individual, and thereby extends them from just one specific activity (such as ploughing) to a whole way of life (that of being a good peasant paterfamilias). Although this socio-theological notion of ‘vocation’ was famously developed by Jean Calvin in the context of the doctrine of predestination,¹³ Grandgousier’s speech shows it being used, also in a reforming context but without any commitment to a wider doctrine of predestination, to attack traditional Catholic practices (here pilgrimage). Rabelais gives enormous weight to this statement, not just through Grandgousier’s Ciceronian style in the quotation above but through the ensuing praise of Grandgousier first by the pilgrims, who call him more instructive than their local preachers, and then by his son Gargantua, who calls him a Platonic philosopher king.

Normativity concerning social function is indeed often at its most intense in Rabelais when applied to peasants, who are not granted the same limited mobility of function, and so of status, that is enjoyed by the narrator Alcofribas Nasier, Panurge, and indeed Frère Jean (and that was enjoyed in reality by François Rabelais).¹⁴ It is significant that Gargantua’s criticism of monks’ prime function (praying) as being useless begins its series of contrasts with the example of peasants (‘ne laboure, comme le paisant’), as if their function were the most useful and the most fixed of all. Gargantua does not grant them the flexibility of function that he then grants to Frère Jean, who is higher up the social scale, and that the ensuing narrative will grant Frère Jean even more.

This peasant ground underlying both of these normative speeches on social function—Gargantua’s on Frère Jean, Grandgousier’s to the pilgrims—becomes still more apparent once we realise that these two speeches are entwined within the narrative structure. Both occur in pauses during the Picrocholine War, and it is Frère Jean, the object of the first speech, who brings the pilgrims to Gargantua and Grandgousier, which produces the second speech. The narrative outcome leads moreover to a third moment at which the question of social function is salient: after the war ends, the question is raised of what Frère Jean should now do? In the period, the cessation of violence was indeed an established moment of function-modulation for warrior nobles. Yet they had well-established ways of negotiating it: by returning to estates to manage them or by maintaining battle-readiness through hunting and falconry. But what about the misfit monk whose fighting was just a temporary replacement function for his useless traditional one of praying?

The violence attributed to Frère Jean is so graphic and extensive, that it is easy to overlook the fact that his new function, that has replaced his original function of praying, is also a less than perfect fit for him. Unlike knights, who have tools for their social function in the shape of horses, armour and swords, Frère Jean has a loose relation with all three of these tools. And that looseness is registered as a problem within the narrative—not at first, when Frère Jean gaily uses a crucifix-staff instead of a sword (p. 79),¹⁵ but later when, having been first taken to Grandgousier on an unchivalric donkey (p. 107), he is reluctantly put into armour and given a fine horse for the next battle, alongside the well mounted members of Gargantua’s household (p. 114), but then has a mishap and loses horse, armour and sword (p. 115), and is happier that way, before then however grabbing another horse on which to fight (p. 121). Such specifying of the gaining and losing of the appropriate tools or attributes for one’s social function and status is abundant and carefully calibrated in Gargantua, especially in relation to horses.¹⁶

So, when in Gargantua the question arises of what Frère Jean’s function should be, now that the war is over and violence has ceased, the question has been prepared by the preceding narrative. If we consider Rabelais’s own life, the question has biographical resonance too. Although the transition was not in his case via violence, the question of what social function a misfit monk could hold had been equally pressing for him personally. If in his own life it had been answered by a switch of profession, to that of physician, in Frère Jean’s it is answered by the fantasy of a new kind of role, that of overseeing a utopian monastery.

In other words, the episode of the abbey of Thélème, which closes Gargantua, is a fictional answer to a question about social function (ergon).¹⁷ Within the logic of the narrative, Thélème is not just an honour for Frère Jean, a reward for the military service he has rendered to Gargantua, but also a function, an office, something for him to do, a new way of serving his lord having first served him militarily. This joint in the narrative logic is concise, but salient nonetheless, since the lengthy Thélème episode starts with these opening words of Chapter 52: ‘Restoit seulement le moyne à pourvoir. Lequel Gargantua vouloit faire abbé de Seuillé: mais il refusa’ (p. 137). Gargantua then offers Frère Jean two alternative abbeys:

Mais le moyne luy fist responce peremptoire, que de moyne il ne vouloit charge ny gouvernement, ‘Car comment (disoit il) pourroy je gouverner aultruy, qui moy-mesmes gouverner ne sçaurois? Si vous semble que je vous aye faict, et que puisse à l’advenir faire service agreable, oultroyez moy de fonder une abbaye à mon devis.’ (p. 137)

At this salient juncture, which introduces the extended final episode of Gargantua, Rabelais loops back to the book’s Prologue, since Frère Jean’s words evoke a scepticism about social function that is associated implicitly in the Thélème episode with Socrates and was associated explicitly with the Greek philosopher in the Prologue (where Socrates has ‘contentement certain, asseurance parfaicte, deprisement incroyable de tout ce pourqoy les humains tant veiglent, courent, travaillent, navigent et bataillent’, p. 6). The monk’s sententious question about his incapacity to rule others because he cannot rule himself imitates a maxim that was widely attributed to Socrates and was based on Socrates’s evocation in Plato’s Republic (590c) of a man of tyrannical disposition who is unable to control himself but finds himself in charge of others.¹⁸ While Frère Jean’s allusion is therefore partly to the tyrant whom he has just helped defeat (Picrochole), Rabelais broadens this caution about social function beyond the easy case of the tyrant to the harder one of the likeable but flawed Frère Jean himself and, through the Socratic link with the Prologue (where Socrates was compared to this book), to the equally hard case of the book Gargantua itself: can it have the function of ruling others, given that it cannot rule itself?

If Frère Jean can rule neither himself nor others and so cannot have a function (ergon) or dignity that gives him command over others within society’s hierarchy, then what kind of function, if any, does he have in relation to the abbey of Thélème itself? The lack of clear answer leaves Frère Jean’s position within social hierarchy rather indeterminate. First, it is unclear whether it is he or Gargantua who is in charge of the abbey. Even Frère Jean’s request to Gargantua, which means on the face of it ‘Allow me to found an abbey’, could potentially mean ‘Do me a favour by founding an abbey’; the ambiguity recurs a sentence later: ‘Et requist à Gargantua qu’il instituast sa religion au contraire de toutes autres’ (p. 137). Does ‘il’ refer to Frère Jean or to Gargantua? Either way, the subsequent indications that it is Gargantua, rather than Frère Jean, who decides the abbey’s lay-out and rules (p. 138) suggest that Frère Jean keeps his word in not taking on the usual responsibilities of an abbot (and also fits Rabelais’s wider Gallican agenda of asserting royal control over monasteries).

Frère Jean’s lack of hands-on involvement in setting up the abbey is striking.¹⁹ Even Frère Jean’s title as abbot of Thélème will have to wait more than a decade (in real historical time) to be confirmed, near the end of the Tiers livre (1546), when the list of members of Pantagruel’s noble household (‘noble maison’) includes ‘frere Jan des entommeures abbé de Theleme’.²⁰

A second indication that Frère Jean (voluntarily) lacks the dignity of office is the fact that this abbey’s members, being the opposite of usual monks, do not make vows of chastity, poverty and obedience (p. 139). The consequences have been assessed by Rabelais scholarship in relation to the members themselves,²¹ but not in relation to Frère Jean, who is thereby deprived (voluntarily) of any authority over them. So, his function is of a strange kind, since the whole point of office in the period was that it bestowed authority (within defined limits). Once more, this arrangement in Thélème can be interpreted as promoting Rabelais’s politico-religious agenda, since it takes the side of the rich nobles to whom Thélème seems to be reserved²² (the social group that he himself sometimes served directly) over religious institutions (from which he had extracted himself). It does so by appealing to the value of freedom (‘fut constitué, […] que chascun feut riche, et vesquist en liberté’, p. 139) that, in addition to having evangelical religious overtones, was habitually cherished and claimed by nobles as a manifestation of their true nobility.²³ Indeed the harnessing of utopianism to the freedom of the nobility seems to be a distinctive contribution by Rabelais to the utopian tradition inaugurated by Thomas More, which like its antecedent in Plato’s Republic does not emphasise free will, whether individual or collective.²⁴

But this governance of Thélème is not just an expression of solidarity with a social elite: it is a reappraisal of the fixity of function (ergon), in both the recycled monk Frère Jean and also the noble members of the religious house, for whom the traditional notions of vocation and of fixed function are rethought: ‘parce que tant hommes que tant femmes une foys repceuz en religion, après l’an de probation estoient focez et astrinctz y demeurer perpetuellement leur vie durante, feust estably que tant hommes que femmes là repceuz, sortiroient quand bon leurs sembleroit franchement et entierement’ (pp. 138–9). This sense that someone’s social role can change over their lifespan was not entirely new in itself: Aristotle asserted it, for example (Politics 1329^a). What is more novel is its extension to legitimize the kind of exit from religious orders that Rabelais himself had undergone.

So social functions, on the fixity of which hierarchy depends, are heavily reinforced in Gargantua, most emphatically for peasants, but also for elites, if in their case with an element of fluidity and of moving with the times to recalibrate function. Heavy though the overall reinforcing of function is, on the other hand it does not entirely drown out a Socratic questioning of it and so of the certainties on which hierarchy is built.

Some writers and thinkers, especially a generation later in France, unsettled more than Rabelais the social relation between function and hierarchy. For example, Montaigne’s Essais drew on Stoicism and other tools to explore the discrepancy between the individual (viewed as complex and singular) and their social function. Montaigne’s contemporary, the advocate Estienne Pasquier, cultivated in his letters a persona that stood overtly apart from his own legal function and its attendant dignity.²⁵ To take another example: in the ensuing decades, with the emergence of so-called absolutism, stronger centralized control of public life led to libertins distinguishing between a person’s public function and their divergent, private self.²⁶ Rabelais, too, distinguishes at times between individuals and their roles, but arguably communicates no such sense of a proto-modern inwardness that is at odds with social function and outward hierarchy. For him, ergon—socially sanctioned doing—is a vital component of social hierarchy, albeit one that is sometimes strained or inadequate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Kenny

Neil Kenny has published on different aspects of early modern French culture, most recently in his Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France (2020). He is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and Professor of French at the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

2 See Romain Menini, Rabelais et l’intertexte platonicien (Paris: Garnier, 2009), pp. 55–6, 68–9; Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: ‘Græciser en François’ (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), pp. 1027–37; Romain Menini, ‘Greco-Roman Tradition and Reception’, in A Companion to François Rabelais, ed. Bernd Renner (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), pp. 121–42 at 129–30; Claude La Charité, ‘Rabelais and Medicine’, in A Companion to François Rabelais, ed. by Renner, pp. 49–74 at 67–8; Olivier Pédéflous, ‘Sur la bibliothèque de Rabelais’, Arts et Savoirs (online), 10 (2018), http://journals.openedition.org/aes/1425 [consulted 19 January 2022].

3 See La Charité, ‘Rabelais and Medicine’, pp. 58–63.

4 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, in The Works, 2 vols, trans. John Parker, (London: James Parker, 1897–9), ii, 149–50 (for the Greek: Patrologia graeca, iv, ed. J.–P. Migne (Paris: J.–P. Migne, 1857), col. 169).

5 On their importance for Rabelais, see A. J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 212–15; Neil Kenny, ‘Making Sense of Intertextuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. by John O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 57–72 at 58–9; Menini, Rabelais et l’intertexte platonicien; Peter Sharatt, ‘Aristotle’, in The Rabelais Encyclopedia, ed. Elizabeth Chesney Zegura (Westport CT and London: 2004), pp. 11–12.

6 François Rabelais, Gargantua, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Mireille Huchon with collaboration by François Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 110. All references are to this edition, which is based on the 1542 edition printed by François Juste in Lyon. See Erasmus, Parabolae sive similia (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1523), sig. 12r; Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend XXIII.

7 For a normative reading of the passage in the context of religious reform, see M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979), pp. 176–8. On Rabelais’s brother Jamet, see Mireille Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

8 See Robert Descimon, ‘Un langage de la dignité. La qualification des personnes dans la société Parisienne à l’époque moderne’, in Dire et vivre l’ordre social en France sous l’Ancien Régime, ed. by Fanny Cosandey (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2005), pp. 69–123 at 75–6, 77; Jonathan Patterson, ‘“Viles personnes”: The Plebeian Multitudes in Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres’, The Seventeenth Century, 31.1, 71–94.

9 The classic study is Georges Duby, Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

10 One of them (Lasdaller) does spout some Latin (p. 106), but the joke may be that peasants would not speak that way.

11 See the editorial note in Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Huchon, p. 1154, n. 12.

12 Ephesians 4.1–4. On the discrepancy between St Paul’s words and Grandgousier’s, see Wes Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 278.

13 See Guenther H. Haas, ‘Calvin’s Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. by Donald McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 93–105 at 96; William R. Stevenson, Jr., ‘Calvin and Political Issues’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. by McKim, pp. 173–87 at 178.

14 On Rabelais’s life, see Huchon, Rabelais. I will expand elsewhere this claim about Alcofribas Nasier and Panurge.

15 See Guillemette Bolens, ‘The Gunpowder Revolution in Literature: Early Modern Wounds in Folengo and Rabelais’, in Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence, ed. by Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 109­–32.

16 See pp. 36, 42, 46, 96, 97, 98–9, 100, 101–2, 131–2, 149.

17 Examples of the abundant scholarship on Thélème include Michaël Baraz, ‘Rabelais et l’Utopie’, Études Rabelaisiennes, 15 (1980), 1–29; V.-L. Saulnier, ‘Mythologies pantagruéliques. L’Utopie en France: Morus et Rabelais’, in Les Utopies à la Renaissance (Paris and Brussels: place, 1963), pp. 135–62 esp. 159–62; Richard Scholar, ‘Rabelais et l’archipel des Utopies’, in Inextinguible Rabelais, ed. by Mireille Huchon, Nicolas Le Cadet, and Romain Menini with collaboration by Marie-Claire Thomine (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), pp. 283–91; Screech, Rabelais, pp. 187–206.

18 The saying was attributed to Socrates in a 14th-century biographical compendium on ancient philosophers, much printed in the late 15th and early 16th century: De vita et moribus philosophorum. (M. A. Screech, ‘Some Reflexions on the Abbey of Thelema‘, Études Rabelaisiennes, VIII (1969), 109–14 at 110). The Republic passage is also alluded to by Erasmus but with wording slightly more distant from Rabelais’s (Screech, Rabelais, p. 201).

19 See Screech, ‘Some Reflexions’, pp. 109–10; Screech, Rabelais, pp. 199–201; François Rabelais, Gargantua, ed. by Gérard Defaux, in Les Cinq Livres (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994), p. 252, n. 4.

20 Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Huchon, p. 500.

21 E.g. Screech, Rabelais, pp. 188–94.

22 See pp. 138 and 143.

23 On the religious overtones, see Screech, Rabelais, pp. 188–91. Screech mentions the social overtones only fleetingly (p. 191). The connection between freedom and noble elites has been emphasised in recent work on Michel de Montaigne by Jean Balsamo, Warren Boutcher, and others.

24 See Baraz, ‘Rabelais’, p. 7; Saulnier, ‘Mythologies’, p. 161.

25 See Benoît Autiquet, ‘Écrire au risque de l’indignité. Le discours de l’autorité dans les Lettres (1586–1619) d’Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615)’, unpublished doctoral thesis (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle / Universität Basel, 2021).

26 See Hélène Merlin-Kajman, L’Absolutisme dans les lettres et la théorie des deux corps: passions et politique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000). My sense of this historical shift is also indebted to an illuminating graduate course, ‘Images of the Self from Rabelais to Rousseau’, that Michael Moriarty designed at the University of Cambridge in the 1990s, and to which I had the privilege of contributing.