Franois Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animati [Hardcover]

Fran?ois Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animationexplores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais's Gargantua and, mostly, his Quart livre.Fran?ois Rabelais and the Renaissance Physiology of Invention: Ingenious Animationexplores the medical poetics of inventive, embodied thinking or ingenuity instantiated in Rabelais'Gargantuaand, mostly,in hisQuart livre. It unsettles established dichotomies in Rabelaisian scholarship between Rabelais's 'lowly' laughter and his 'high', erudite message and reassesses the Rabelaisian grotesque by highlighting its debts to grotesque ornament, this marginal yet omnipresent Renaissance visual art.Bodily functions are a trademark of Rabelais's poetics. Scholarship has read them as signs of carnivalesque inversion, in line with the Bakhtinian grotesque, or of satirical degradation: in both instances, the 'lowly' is opposed to the 'high', the belly to the head. Yet for a physician like Rabelais, the 'head' or the brain as the site of cognition is not opposed to what is below it: the chest as the site of breathing, the belly and its nether regions as sites of nutrition and generation. In Renaissance medicine, these are integrated physiological systems whose products fuel each other's operations, including cognition.Read through this lens and alongside his diagnosis of the healthy or diseased culture of his time (rotting scholasticism, the humanist digestion of the classical heritage, or the schismatic convulsions shaking Christianity) Rabelais's fictions testify to his reflexive investigation into how culture results from physiological processes fuelling the inventive ability of the human animal, made manifest in pedagogical, artistic, mechanical, and spiritual 'inventions'. They display the life (rather than the truth) of culture stemming from humaningenia, that is, wits conditioned by biological natures. While tl3-