François Rabelais’s “Gargantua and Pantagruel”—loosely related tales of gluttonous, drunken giants and their fantastic adventures—was one of the most notorious works of Renaissance Europe, condemned by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant reformer John Calvin as obscene and irreligious.
In Elizabethan and early Stuart England, familiarity with Rabelais signaled membership in a cosmopolitan elite. But it was only with the 17th-century translations of “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by the eccentric Scottish laird Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Huguenot refugee Peter Motteux that Rabelaisian comedy became fully a part of English literature.
In “Comic Enlightenment,” Nicholas McDowell reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Urquhart and Motteux’s work during the Civil Wars and Restoration.
