‘Doctrine moult paradoxe et nouvelle’: Linguistic and Medical Innovation in Rabelais's Tiers Livre
Queen Mary, University of London
One hitherto neglected avenue to the study of sixteenth-century paradoxes is through the history of the word. Focusing on Rabelais's use of the adjective paradoxe in the Tiers Livre (1546), this article proposes to examine the earliest known occurrences of the word in the French language. Why does Rabelais use it for the first time in the Tiers Livre, and why are nearly all the occurrences of this term in his work confined to the Tiers Livre? Rabelais may have been influenced, as critics have noted, by Ortensio Lando's Paradossi, a collection of mock encomia published in Lyon in 1543, and by the anonymous Paradoxe contre les lettres (1545), whose authorship has been attributed to Maurice Scève. But he may also, I argue, have drawn on learned Latin and vernacular paradoxes, as exemplified by works of Cicero, Andrea Alciato and Leonhart Fuchs, which were published in Lyon at the time by Sébastien Gryphe and Jean de Tournes. To illustrate the impact that these paradoxes had on Rabelais's thought, I turn to medical paradoxes and follow the traces of one particular medical controversy, regarding suppers and lunches and which should be the lighter of the two meals, in Rabelais's fictional writings.