Renaissance et Réforme / 1 25 for many reasons his argument is not convincing. "The spirit of free and critical inquiry stemming from the Renaissance" found in Erasmus along with "the spirit of respectful, trusting adherence to dogma" (p. 308) could easily become unmoored If unbelief, whether in Christianity or the supernatural, is impossible in the century then it is difficult to account for Montaigne, not so much his use of ancient scepticism to attack religious dogmatism, but that, following Auerbach, a personal Christianity should be so far from Montaigne's acknowledged concerns. The issue does not seem to be belief or unbelief, but in the wake of Foucault, who is anticipated in Febvre's final pages, the identification of knowledge with interpretation and the role played by similitude in intellectual constructs. Febvre himself speaks ofLe Disciple de Pantagruel as "an insipid hodgepodge with nothing in it," and even its learned and meticulous editors speakof its "contes à dormir debout." Just as Febvre allows us to measure first-rate minds in all their force and complexity against third-rate poetasters, so Le Disciple provides a foil to Rabelais' s narrative genius. The editors can be praised for the interesting things they have to say about literary mediocrity: the independence of constituent elements, characteristic of folklore; the absence of allegory and polemical nuance; the simple formulas of causality; the superficial borrowing of Rabelaisian nomenclature (as opposed to Rabelais's wholesale theft of folkloric material); the charming animation of objects, but a corresponding inability to represent character.
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