‘Motz […] en main’ or words you can hold in your hand: Rabelais in the Printshop (Quart Livre, 55–6)

Abstract

In chapters 55-56 of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Pantagruel and his companions encounter a soundscape of inexplicable, disembodied voices and noises, which turn out to be sounds that have frozen into visible, tangible, sensory objects. This article uses the episode to think about words as objects in the world, with a physical presence and sensible properties. Considering first the widespread critical suspicion of the frozen words’ materiality through the lens of the fetish, the article then turns to the material culture of textual production and focuses on the sixteenth-century printshop, where words, in the form of metal type, are also things. The article aims to take a new perspective on the materiality of the frozen words; to consider Rabelais’s familiarity with the printing process; and to explore the impact of the technology of movable type on perceptions of meaning and error in Rabelais’s work.

Towards the end of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Pantagruel and his travelling companions sail into a soundscape of inexplicable, disembodied voices and noises, ‘voix et sons tant divers, d’homes, de femmes, d’enfans, de chevaulx’.¹ When the friends start to discern the strange and threatening sounds in chapter 55, their first reaction is panic. Panurge believes they are being ambushed, and Pantagruel offers a series of classical references and possible interpretations of what they are experiencing.² He speculates that they are hearing words trickling down from a Platonic ‘manoir de Verité’; Homer’s winged and strangely animate words, or Plato’s teaching that thaws in the mind if the pupil matures; or finally, they may be hearing Orpheus’s decapitated head, still singing as it floats out to sea. In chapter 56 the pilot reassures them all with a less conjectural and less mystical explanation: the sounds are, in fact, those of a battle that took place in the winter, when it was so cold they froze, thawing in the more temperate air.

The frozen words now become visible and tangible to the whole company:

– Tenez tenez (dist Pantagruel) voyez en cy qui encores ne sont degelées. Lors nous jecta sus le tillac plenes mains de parolles gelées, et sembloient dragée perlée de diverses couleurs. Nous y veismes des motz de gueule, des motz de sinople, des motz de azur, des motz de sable, des motz d’orez. Les quelz estre quelque peu eschauffez entre nos mains fondoient, comme neiges, et les oyons realement. Mais ne les entendions. Car c’estoit languaige Barbare. (Ch. 56, p. 670)

The emphasis in this passage is on the words’ tactile, haptic quality: hard objects like brightly coloured sweets that Pantagruel throws down on the deck and the friends warm in their hands. When they melt, they offer auditory sensation rather than understanding, as the foreign sounds that are released are incomprehensible. This materialization of words, voice, and sound allows Rabelais to play with the literalization of metaphors and other figures of speech: Pantagruel refuses to ‘donner parolles’ like a lover, or to ‘vendre parolles’ like a lawyer.³ The frozen words are colourful, like Aristotle’s metaphorically black and white words, providing the opportunity to pun on ‘mots de gueule’ as both heraldic red and the companionable, risqué, insulting exchanges that might take place at the kind of drunken banquet that Pantagruel and his friends specialize in.⁴

In what follows, I use this episode to think about words as objects in the world, with a physical presence and sensible properties. Judith Anderson considers Rabelais’s text in her exploration of how Renaissance linguists thought about the substantiality of language in the wake of Erasmus’s work on res and verba in the Copia, where (as Terence Cave puts it) the indeterminacy of both terms results in a coalescence of ‘word-things’.⁵ Anderson concludes: ‘What seems even more obvious, however, is the extent to which Rabelais’s frozen words – visible, gustatory, multicolored, audible, shaped, consequential, and affective – explore the relation of words to things and, broadly conceived, the materiality of language’.⁶ We are accustomed to thinking about Rabelais’s themes as embodied and material, particularly through the lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism. Rabelais’s text, too, makes several allusions to its own existence as material object, as in the meditation on textual transmission at the beginning of Gargantua where the worm-eaten genealogy of the giants found written on bark in an ancient monument is reproduced with all its gaps, hesitations, and uncertainties (ch. 2, OC, pp. 11–14). Here I consider further the materiality of Rabelais’s text. First, I look briefly at the critical literature on the materiality of the frozen words and the tendency to dismiss them as lifeless, sterile, and somehow perverse, objects of a misguided and, it is often argued, fetishistic fascination. Then, I explore Rabelais’s connections to a particular place in which words are very obviously things: the sixteenth-century printshop.

Words as things

The frozen words have attracted a lot of critical attention, setting the episode in the contexts of sixteenth-century law, ancient philosophy, medical accounts of the voice and breath, and Renaissance linguistic theory.⁷ While it gives Rabelais licence to riff gleefully and with wide-ranging erudition on the binding power of language, naturalized metaphor, and the transmission of knowledge, there is a long-standing critical tradition of mistrust and suspicion of the frozen words’ materiality as mere words, ‘not priceless nuggets of logos’.⁸ From this critical perspective, words should not be things. Frozen words represent the dead letter over the living spirit; the baleful power of tyranny and the deadening weight of dogmatism; and (in Michel Jeanneret’s terms) the fetishism and iconolatry of the hyper-Catholic Papimanes, whose island the travellers have just visited.⁹ Once frozen, words become inert objects, exchangeable commodities, nothing more. When the narrator wants to conserve some of the frozen words in oil, Pantagruel refuses, saying ‘estre follie faire reserve de ce dont jamais l’on n’a faulte, et que tous jours on a en main, comme sont motz de gueule entre tous bons et joyeulx Pantagruelistes’ (pp. 670–71). Jeanneret argues that the narrator, thinking of the book he will write – ‘un tombeau pétrifié’ – becomes fixated with the materiality of the frozen objects when he would be more profitably engaged in conversations involving living words.¹⁰ If the narrator, in this paradigm, represents textual transmission that promotes itself as fixed, authoritative, and inarguable, then the oral transmission favoured by Pantagruel remains ephemeral and alive. Spoken words, in the Western tradition famously identified and problematized by Jacques Derrida, are privileged instances of authenticity and presence, and written words labour helplessly for the same clarity and transparency.¹¹ And yet the metaphor that Pantagruel reaches for – ‘tous jours en main’ – is an insistent material imagining of how language works and how words circulate.

Many of Rabelais’s intertexts, however, like modern criticism point towards suspicion of the frozen words. Plutarch’s Moralia, one of Rabelais’s sources for Pantagruel’s suggestion that Plato’s words freeze when they are first heard, tells the story as a critique of those who are ‘for ever foolishly taking account and inventory of their literary stock, but [who] lay up nothing else which would be to their own profit’.¹² Plutarch, as Judith Anderson argues, distrusts ‘knowledge that is in some way objectified, formal, and unessential’.¹³ Plutarch’s preference is for an affective and flexible philosophy: ‘when students of philosophy pass from the ostentatious and artificial to the kind of discourse which deals with character and feeling they begin to make real and unaffected progress’.¹⁴ Those who store Plato’s frozen words, for safety or for display, have not understood or made use of them. If, as Terence Cave has argued, Rabelais’s source for the narrative of Orpheus’s head is Lucian’s ‘The Ignorant Book Collector’, then this intertext shows a similar scorn for showy and superficial learning.¹⁵ Lucian deploys the Orpheus myth in an act of cultural gatekeeping in order to deflate the pretensions of a rich uneducated man who can only appreciate the material qualities of the books he buys: ‘you are always unrolling them and rolling them up, glueing them, trimming them, smearing them with saffron and oil of cedar, putting slip-covers on them, and fitting them with knobs, just as if you were going to derive some profit from them’.¹⁶ Other classical examples are equally satirical about this workaday attitude to words. In Aristophanes’s The Frogs, poetic language is comically subjected to a mercantile competitive logic in which individual words are weighed to determine their worth.¹⁷ Closer in time to Rabelais, however, the frozen words in a story in Book 2 of Castiglione’s Courtier (1528) are not inert objects but acquire a strange kind of residual agency. During a commercial transaction that takes place across a frozen river, words freeze in mid-air; when they are eventually thawed by a fire built on the ice, they adopt the agency of the speakers, who have long since left: ‘it seemed to the merchant that the words asked too high a price for the sables’, and so he does not buy them.¹⁸

The equation of matter with dogmatism and death has a similarly long history and was particularly embedded in Rabelais’s evangelical reading of Paul. A Platonic suspicion of the material world and its deceptions as a feeble copy of an intangible, immaterial realm of ideas echoes through Paul’s antagonistic pairing of flesh and spirit as well as early modern evangelical and Protestant denunciations of Catholic idolatry and superstition. A form of this suspicion is perceptible in critics like Jeanneret’s aversion to the material if it is ‘une matière sans âme’, a ‘réduction de l’immatériel au sensible’.¹⁹

In the face of this hefty tradition, it is perhaps perverse to attempt a rehabilitation of Rabelais’s frozen words as material objects. Arguably, part of their compelling appeal is the suggestion that they might afford access to transcendent truth, as in Pantagruel’s speculations.²⁰ Panurge is still in oracular mode even after hearing the pilot’s demystifying explanation: ‘Mais en pourrions nous veoir quelqu’une ? Me soubvient avoir leu que l’orée de la montaigne en laquelle Moses receut la loy des Juifz le peuple voyoit les voix sensiblement’ (p. 669).²¹ And yet Rabelais’s depictions of attachment to material objects are often ambivalent. The Papimanes’ veneration of their copy of the Decretals (which they insist is not a copy: ‘angelicquement escriptes’, declares Homenaz, ‘Celles de vostre pays ne sont que transsumpts des nostres’, p. 653), inspires the friends in their gleeful catalogue of material calamities. Panurge is prompted to argue that printing has demystified and even desacralized the individual text: ‘Decrotoueres, voyre diz je Decretales, avons prou veu en papier, en parchemin lanterné, en velin, escriptes à la main, et imprimées en moulle. Jà n’est besoing que vous penez à cestez cy nous monstrer’ (ch. 49, p. 653). Panurge’s insistence on the ordinariness of mechanical reproductions emphasizes not only their lack of aura but also their material reality, their ephemerality, and ultimate end as wastepaper, ‘Decrotoueres’. But the disastrous consequences of using the Decretals as wastepaper, despite the satirical intent, suggest the kind of uncanny contagious power that Pantagruel feels as an itch in his arm when he touches the Papimanes’ Decretals (p. 652) and which he detects in their portrait of the pope: ‘c’estoit ouvraige tel que les faisoit Dædalus. Encores qu’elle feust contrefaicte, et mal traicte, y estoit latent et occulte quelque divine energie en matiere de pardons’ (ch. 50, p. 654).²² Copies of the Decretals refuse to behave in the ways suggested by Platonic mimesis – inert and lifeless shadows of their originals – but retain the liveliness of an Epicurean atom.²³

Rabelais repeatedly emphasizes the materiality of the frozen words, suggesting an experience and understanding of language that neither imagines words as immaterial vehicles of meaning nor assumes a natural, Cratylist connection between words and things, but simply recognizes that words – spoken, written, and printed – are material objects.²⁴ ‘If words are to serve as transparent representations of things, their own thinglike or sensible properties must be overlooked’, argues Margreta de Grazia, who identifies a historical emphasis on this perspective in the English early seventeenth century.²⁵ The term that modern critics turn to in order to dismiss the frozen words – fetishism – has its own early modern history that also suggests a shift in the relationship between words and things in the context of emerging imperial ambitions.

It is perhaps appropriate to associate the compelling power of the frozen words, encountered by a strange band of travellers in a fictionalized hybrid of odyssey, quest, satire, and travel narrative, with the power of the fetish, a word and idea developed in the cross-cultural encounter between west European and west African peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁶ The Portuguese ‘feitiço’ was originally an object used in witchcraft, deriving connotations of artificiality and fraudulence from its Latin root facere (to make). In the Portuguese encounter with west African practices and beliefs, feitiço came to refer to an indigenous magical object, an ersatz version of their own relics; this meaning provided an obvious analogy for Catholic superstition and idolatry for the Protestant Dutch merchants who followed the Portuguese. In both cases, the ‘fetish’ was an object that claimed illusory spiritual power, a magical hold over material reality. But west Africans’ perceived fixation on the material object also created an economic opportunity for Europeans, allowing them to trade cheap but useful items such as beads and knives for valuable exchangeable commodities such as gold.

If the fetish was perceived as a fraud by sixteenth-century European traders, it enabled a greater deceit that characterized the European encounter with Africa and the Americas. Jacques Cartier, for example, on his first exploratory voyage in 1534 to what became known as the Gulf of St Lawrence, notes with some satisfaction that the French are able to initiate trade with a group of Iroquoians with ‘cousteaulx pathenostres de voyrre paignes et aultres besongnes de peu de valleur’.²⁷ The deceitful potential inherent in the idea of the fetish is also present in the Rabelaisian episode, where Panurge’s desire for the frozen words evokes the proverb ‘donner paroles’, recorded in Erasmus’s adage ‘Dare verba’, or, as his modern translator emphasizes, ‘to give empty words’.²⁸ The solidification of the frozen words tuns them into a kind of counterfeit money, pleasant playthings perhaps, but ultimately part of the fraudulent economy of the fake.

William Pietz argues that what was really at stake in the European dismissal of what they called the fetish was, more than the suspicion of idolatry, actually the apprehension of the power of the material object over the subject: ‘a subversion’, as he puts it, ‘of the ideal of the autonomously determined self’.²⁹ West African conceptions of the relationship between subject and object represented in European ideas of the ‘fetish’ challenged and problematized this emerging European ideal. For Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, the invention of the fetish happened at a crucial moment in the development of European subjectivity, ‘founded’, they argue, ‘on the disavowal of the power of objects’.³⁰ But this disavowal was in tension with other sixteenth-century conceptions of identity and personhood: that of the aristocrat who was defined and empowered by his property, for instance, or the friend who articulates and affirms his status and identity through a gift.³¹ The refusal to allow objects power, the dismissal of this possibility as magical or superstitious thinking, might be an expression of a fear precisely of objects’ power to define or even to constitute the subject.³² This developing binary between subject and object occurs at the same time in European intellectual history as an insistence on the separation between words and things. Non-European understandings of value suggested an ontological enmeshing of subject and object that threatened the emerging European economy of extraction and exchange value. In complex ritual traditions, words themselves take on object-like qualities, especially in the ceremonial oratory of marriage agreements.³³

From this perspective, the Quart Livre is premised on a cynical and degraded exchange practice in which words no longer have any purchase: Panurge’s bad faith in his marriage quest and his seeming determination to ‘give empty words’ rather than the binding ones of a successful marriage negotiation. The Quart Livre begins in a market, Medamothi, where the strange and wonderful objects the friends buy visually represent highly abstract and immaterial things: Platonic ideas, Epicurean atoms, and Echo ‘selon le naturel’ (ch. 2, p. 541).³⁴ The unbridled consumption of the market scene gives way, with the arrival of a ship from Utopia seeking news of the travellers, to a Maussian exchange of gifts and words between Pantagruel and his father, Gargantua, in agonistic mode, where Pantagruel declares himself almost fatally incapable of returning his father’s gift with sufficient gratitude, ‘opprimé d’obligations infinies toutes procreés de vostre immense benignité, et impotant à la minime partie de recompense’ (ch. 4, p. 546).³⁵ The exaggerated courtesy and deference expressed by Pantagruel to his father is in marked contrast to the cynical expedience evident in Cartier’s trade encounters with the Iroquoians.

Rituals of exchange and gift-giving suggest one way of thinking about words as more than simply representations but as things in the world.³⁶ Beyond – or before – interpretation, explanation, and literalization, Rabelais’s text invites us to focus on the word as material object and not as ideal and suprasensible signifier:

Et y veids des parolles bien picquantes, des parolles sanglantes, les quelles le pillot nous disoit quelques foys retourner on lieu duquel estoient proferées, mais c’estoit la guorge couppée, des parolles horrificques, et aultres assez mal plaisantes à veoir. (p. 670)

The material qualities of these words – sharp and bloodied – have equally material consequences. And yet the travellers are allowed to delight in the brightly coloured objects and to play with them (‘nous y eusmez du passetemps beaucoup’). Rabelais conjures a complex multi-sensory experience as the brightly coloured objects clatter onto the deck, appealing perhaps to sight first of all – there is an insistent repetition in the episode of the verb voir, as Jeanneret and others have pointed out – but also to touch (the travellers warm them in their hands to thaw them out into sound), hearing (not only the sounds that are released as they melt, which include cries, screams, whinnies, and booms as well as articulated words, but also those of the frozen objects hitting the deck), and even taste and smell (the ‘dragée perlée de diverses couleurs’ is glossed by Judith Anderson as a crystallized sweetmeat, a confection of crystalized syrup around a kernel of hazel or almond).³⁷ Although the travellers do not (as far as we’re told) put the frozen words in their mouths, the dragée might encourage us to imagine them doing so, recalling the fact that sound and voice are produced by material processes, as Bruce R. Smith and Gina Bloom have pointed out.³⁸ In sixteenth-century physiology, voice was conceived as ‘a substance […] “made” of breath’, produced in the body and carried on the air to the cavities of the listening ear.³⁹ If Epicurean atomism provides a materialist explanation of how sound travels as a continuous stream of atomic particles, Rabelais’s frozen words arrest this stream in mid-air, rendering the sounds temporarily visible and tactile.⁴⁰

Words emerge from this analysis as part of material culture but not as matter that is inert or dead. The second half of this article explores the materiality of language not in the context of Renaissance linguistic or physiological theory but in relation to the material culture of textual production. Rabelais’s text exploits the affordances of print, incorporating lists, acrostics, and liminal material such as prefaces and, in later editions, the royal privilège, suggesting a familiarity with emerging conventions; it also suggests a familiarity with the processes of the printshop.

Moveable type

The printshop was a place where words were very obviously things. Margreta de Grazia describes the material aspects of words as their duration as sound when spoken, and their extension as marks when written or printed, and in the printshop they are also type, characters made of metal that you can ‘pick up and hold in your hand’, as the typographer and historian Harry Carter put it.⁴¹ Type was made by first pushing a metal patrix or punch (‘poinçon’) into a piece of soft copper to create a matrix (‘matrice’), ‘l’impression du charactere frappé’, as the celebrated Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin explains in a 1567 dialogue on writing and printing.⁴² Molten metal (an alloy of lead, antimony, and tin) was poured into the matrix, held firm by a mould, to create a single character or sort. The mould would ensure that all characters in a set were of uniform size. Plantin – or the representative printer in the dialogue, indicated only as ‘E’, no doubt one of the Estiennes – lists different fonts in a way that materializes them, like Rabelais’s frozen words, into visual and tactile objects: ‘lettres mignonnes, nonpareilles, et parangonées’, ‘lettre batarde’, ‘lettre de parchemin’.⁴³

Type was a significant expense in the set-up of a sixteenth-century printing business: a full set of characters would be far more expensive than the printing press itself, a circumstance that meant printers might share type, and personnel and hardware moved frequently between establishments.⁴⁴ Creative solutions were sometimes necessary for want of type, as in a 1552 edition of the Quart Livre where the printer, who gives his name as Baltasar Aleman and place of publication as Lyon, seemingly lacking Greek capitals, used roman or adapted roman characters for Rabelais’s Greek: a mutilated T for Γ, and an M on its side for Σ.⁴⁵ Another ‘kludge’ – ‘any improvised solution to a problem that appropriates tools or materials to new, unintended uses’, as James Misson defines it – appears in Chrestien Wechel’s 1546 Tiers Livre where, in the Prologue, the number ‘2’ has been used instead of the letter ‘r’ (‘Hors d’icy de par le diable hay. […] G22. g222. g222222’), a choice that, Stephen Rawles and M. A. Screech explain, ‘puzzled compositors who often printed it as “z”’, a misunderstanding that continues into modern editions.⁴⁶

The production of movable type materializes language in a particularly regularized way, as Katie Chenoweth argues: ‘The typographer’s metal letters […] materialize language as “available stock”; the body of the vernacular accordingly becomes a ready “reserve” of metal type waiting to be deployed’.⁴⁷ The metaphorical possibilities offered by the new technology were not long in passing into literary culture, as Margreta de Grazia has shown for early modern England; Montaigne offers a French example in his reflections on formative habitus: ‘la coustume a desjà, sans y penser, imprimé si bien en moy son caractere en certaines choses, que j’appelle excez de m’en despartir’.⁴⁸ Montaigne’s play on the multiple meanings of caractere suggests custom as a quality (how ‘certaines choses’ are done), as an instrument (like the individual metal sort), and as a mark (like the inked impression of the type on the paper).

Like many sixteenth-century writers, Rabelais was familiar with the work of the print house, having worked as an editor and corrector for Sebastian Gryphe, the publisher of his learned medical editions, on the rue Mercière in Lyon in 1532. Claude Nourry, the printer of the first edition of Pantagruel, probably in 1532, had his workshop close by, as did François Juste, for whom Rabelais worked editing vernacular poetry and who printed later editions of the Pantagruel sequence.⁴⁹ Gryphe’s workshop in Lyon was, according to Natalie Zemon Davis, a ‘carrefour de deux mondes’, a place where writers and humanists such as Guillaume Scève, Barthélemy Aneau, and Etienne Dolet, as well as Rabelais, encountered the muscled workers who manned the press, ink-stained apprentices, and compositors.⁵⁰ As editor for Gryphe of classical and sixteenth-century Greek and Latin medical texts, Rabelais would have frequented the printshop and corrected proofs there. Stephen Rawles and Michael Screech speculate that it may even be his hand that crossed out misprints and inked in corrections in the margins in the editions of Giovanni Manardi’s medical letters and of Galen and Hippocrates, edited by Rabelais and printed by Sebastian Gryphe in 1532.⁵¹ Later in his career, Rabelais may have come across Sebastian’s brother François in Paris, where he was a respected punchcutter who sold type to celebrated humanist printer Chrestien Wechel.⁵² Rabelais was also involved in the printing, editing, and correcting of the Pantagruel sequence, intervening in the proofs, revising certain editions – a copy of the 1552 edition of the Quart Livre survives with marginal notes in his hand – and responding to pirate editions and unauthorized versions of his work, both explicitly in his Prologues and implicitly by preparing revised editions.⁵³

Natalie Zemon Davis shows that Gryphe was a particularly conscientious printer who took pride in the accuracy of his books and the aesthetics of his type; Rabelais may have picked up from him an appreciation of the mise-en-page, the ‘unrecognized creative labor’ of the printshop, as Claire Bourne puts it.⁵⁴ Other sixteenth-century writers went further with the ludic possibilities of print. Geoffroy Tory’s meticulous treatise on the French language and its letters, Champ Fleury, is also an exhilarating exploration of the possibilities of typography from the period when type design was beginning to develop.⁵⁵ Estienne Tabourot reproduced a number of what he called ‘rebus’ in his expansive collection of Bigarrures: visual puzzles in which words need to be read as things in space in order to decipher their meaning.⁵⁶ But from the first printing of the Pantagruel sequence, Rabelais was attentive to the material aspect of his page and to the typography of his books. Claude Nourry’s title page for the first known edition of Pantagruel mimicked legal textbooks, a choice that critics have interpreted as a deliberate play on the expectations of its readers; the text itself was printed in gothic typeface.⁵⁷ In the 1542 revised editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Juste was still using bastard gothic characters after roman had become the norm throughout France (Lyon printers were late to adopt roman, still using gothic even for Latin texts in the 1530s), a choice that Stephen Rawles argues was probably Rabelais’s, who ‘voulait maintenir l’ironie visuelle de l’image de Silène dans des livres qui, autrement, déprécient les choses gothiques dans le sens plus large’.⁵⁸ Rabelais’s attachment to gothic was dropped when he had the Tiers Livre printed under his own name in Paris by Chrestien Wechel in 1546.

In the Quart Livre, the sounds that the travellers thaw out in their hands are clamouring to be read aloud or even sung; Mireille Huchon has pointed out that some of Rabelais’s onomatopoeic sounds come from Clément Janequin’s extraordinary soundscape of the Battle of Marignan, La Bataille.⁵⁹ But in their printed incarnation they also have a clear aesthetic aspect on the page. The frozen words draw attention to their thingness and to the spaces that they occupy both in the story – scooped up from the air by Pantagruel, bouncing onto the deck, held and warmed in the hand – and on the page, as printed words. When thawed, the frozen words release their preserved sounds, which appear almost hypnotic on the page as strings of repeated letters:

Les quelles ensemblement fondues ouysmes, hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tocque, torche, lorgne, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, traccc, trac, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr. On, on, on, on, ououououon … (p. 670)

In printed form, the thawing words are compelling objects. The initial predominance of ascenders (hin, torche, lorgne, brededin, frr, bou, traccc) provides a kind of visual hook for the eye, then condenses into nuggets like the frozen words themselves in the concluding sequence of primary letters (ououououon).

This page (Figure 1) in Michel Fezandat’s 1552 Paris edition must have put considerable pressure on Fezandat’s stock of type (particularly rs) and posed a particular challenge for compositors whose work, as Adam Smyth insists, was always delicate: picking out the type and placing it in the composing stick with fingertips, relying on precise and deft movements, feeling for the groove on one side of the sort to ensure the letter was the right way up.⁶⁰ In his encomium of printing, André Thevet quite unusually emphasizes the labour of the print house: ‘par ce que le labeur est si penible qu’un homme n’y sçaroit fournir pour un jour entier, ils tirent la presse l’un apres l’autre & par tour’.⁶¹ Thinking about the physical labour of the print house, Smyth argues, means thinking about texts less in terms of meaning, imagery, and symbolism, and more as a ‘problem or a puzzle that occupies space, and that must be made to occupy a different space: from loose letters in a tray, to a composing stick, to a galley, to a locked-in chase, to a forme in the press’.⁶² Christophe Plantin, similarly, describes the work of the compositor in almost geometric terms, enclosing, framing, squaring: ‘il compasse’, ‘il les met’, ‘il parfait’, ‘il les impose’.⁶³ Working backwards and upside down, compositors saw words not so much as units of meaning as spatial puzzles, perhaps even as rebus. Similarly, Rabelais’s frozen words no longer seem to offer an interpretative challenge after they thaw: ‘ne les entendions. Car c’estoit language Barbare’ (p. 670). Katie Kadue has recently drawn attention to the repetitive, menial, and domestic nature of intellectual work in the Renaissance, and the work of the compositor could well fit into her category of ‘domestic Georgic’: painstaking, constant, repetitive work that enables the maintenance and preservation of literary production.⁶⁴

Figure 1: Quart Livre (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1552), p. 118. BnF, département Réserve des livres rares. Reproduced with permission.

Thinking about words as type, as loose letters in a tray or arranged in a composing stick, gives a fresh perspective on Rabelais’s later anxious engagement with censorship, piracy, and error. The popularity of Rabelais’s work resulted in a significant number of unauthorized printings and pirate editions. The Quart Livre in particular bristles with defensive arguments and protestations of innocence after Rabelais’s earlier encounters with the Sorbonne – which had condemned Pantagruel and Gargantua in 1543 and the Tiers Livre in 1546 – and other critics. In his dedicatory letter to cardinal Odet de Châtillon, Rabelais ultimately appeals to royal authority as guarantor of his good faith: first François I and then his son, Henri II, found nothing objectionable in his books, he claims, and indeed both issued privilèges in Rabelais’s name in 1545 and 1550.⁶⁵ Rabelais himself alludes in the Quart Livre’s dedicatory letter to the ‘privilege et particuliere protection contre les calumniateurs’ granted him by Henri II, no doubt through the intermediary of Châtillon. These privilèges were relatively unusually issued in Rabelais’s name, rather than in the name of the printer or publisher, perhaps because of the large number of pirate and unauthorized editions in circulation. Chrestien Wechel’s 1546 edition of the Tiers Livre even states in the colophon that it was printed ‘pour et au nom de M. Franc. Rabelais’, ‘formule étonnante’, as Michèle Clément argues, as if the edition had been printed at the author’s expense.⁶⁶ Both royal privilèges licence Rabelais to print and reprint editions of his extant works and any revised versions he might produce, authorizing the suppression and confiscation of pirate editions. The 1550 privilège issued by Henri II explicitly extends this suppression to books falsely attributed to Rabelais: ‘Pareillement supprimer ceulx qui faulcement luy sont attribuez’.⁶⁷

In the letter to Odet de Châtillon, Rabelais draws on familiar tropes to blame uncharitable readers and careless printers for perceived unorthodoxy: ‘quelque mangeur de serpens, qui fondoit mortelle hæresie sus un N. mis pour un M. par la faulte et negligence des imprimeurs’ (p. 520). This is a reference to the Tiers Livre of 1546, where it was surely Rabelais and not the negligence of his printer, Chrestien Wechel, who three times replaced ame with asne in the Raminagrobis episode, where a scandalized Panurge accuses the poet of slandering the monastic orders.⁶⁸ There are records of a court case between Wechel, demandeur, and Rabelais, defendeur, in 1546, the same year as Wechel’s Tiers Livre; the records give no detail, but the case might explain their short-lived association and Rabelais’s uncharitable reference to the printer in the Quart Livre’s dedicatory letter.⁶⁹ The âne/âme joke was removed in Michel Fezandat’s 1552 Paris edition, which, Mireille Huchon argues, was one that Rabelais must have overseen, given the number of corrections made during the print run.⁷⁰

But the ‘negligence des imprimeurs’ was a believable claim. Both the 1545 and 1550 privilèges – ‘privilèges bavards’, in Michèle Clément’s words – are detailed and explicit about the damage Rabelais had experienced at the hands of unscrupulous printers.⁷¹ The 1550 privilège, for example, asserts forcefully: ‘les Imprimeurs auroient iceulx livres corrompuz, depravez, et pervertiz en plusieurs endroitz. Auroient d’avantaige imprimez plusieurs autres livres scandaleux, ou nom dudict suppliant, à son grand desplaisir, prejudiuce, et ignominie’ (OC, p. 343). This is a powerful invocation of the moral agency of printed books and the morally and materially corrupt character of unauthorized editions. These ‘livres scandaleux’, which threaten to lead author and audience astray and whose suppression and confiscation the privilège authorizes, also appear in the Quart Livre’s dedicatory letter, where Rabelais complains that ‘meschantement l’on m’en [sc. livres] a aulcuns supposé faulx et infames’ (OC, p. 520). For Mireille Huchon, the privilège is most likely referring to the anonymous 1549 pamphlet attacking the hypocrisies of the church and the nobility, Le Cinquiesme Livre des faictz et dictz du noble Pantagruel.⁷² Prefatory material had been used to attack unauthorized Rabelais editions before, most spectacularly in Pierre de Tournes’s 1542 preface to the reader responding to Etienne Dolet’s 1542 printing of Pantagruel which included the anonymous work Les Merveilleuses Navigations de Panurge.⁷³ Pierre de Tournes addresses the reader (‘l’imprimeur au lecteur, salut’) with the warning: ‘Soies adverty que par avarice a esté soubstraict l’exemplaire de ce livre encores estant soubz la presse, par un Plagiaire, homme encliné a tout mal’.⁷⁴ It is a vicious character assassination of Dolet as plagiarist and parvenu and is included in some copies of François Juste’s 1542 editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel – ‘ce livre encores […] soubz la presse’ – defending, as Rawles and Screech put it, the interests of the Tournes/Juste enterprise against the unscrupulous activities of a rival printer.⁷⁵

Even in the absence of perfidious plagiarism, misprints were common in the most careful of editions; Adam Smyth argues that ‘[p]rinting brings errors into being with an astonishing frequency’, and bibliographer David McKitterick that discussions between printers and authors were focused less on eliminating variation and error than on what degree of variation was acceptable.⁷⁶ Type was sorted and stored in compartments in a wooden case for quick retrieval by the compositor; according to Thevet, the organization was complex: ‘Les lettres […] sont mises en une grande casse de bois, pleine de petis cassis, esquels sont distribuées selon leurs differences, & bien d’autre disposition que l’ordre alphabetique ne requiert coustumierement’.⁷⁷ Type put back in the wrong compartment of the case was one of the most frequent causes of later error.⁷⁸ Chrestien Wechel’s 1546 edition of the Tiers Livre did contain ‘foul case’ errors and inadvertences of this kind – for example, in the printing of François I’s privilège of 1545, the ‘u’ and the ‘n’ are confused, probably through sorting error, or possibly by being placed in the composing stick upside down.⁷⁹ Rabelais as physician noted the potentially fatal consequences of printer error in the dedicatory letter to Geoffroy d’Estissac of his edition of Hippocrates and Galen:

Chose qui, si on la juge habituellement comme une imperfection partout ailleurs, est un crime dans les livres de médecine. Dans ceux-ci en effet, un seul petit mot ajouté ou retranché, ou même un petit signe changé [inuersus] ou déplacé a souvent causé la mort de plusieurs milliers de personnes.⁸⁰

Similar errors in the Pantagruel sequence might entail fewer deaths but (Rabelais fears) could nonetheless lead to his execution for heresy, a fate he alludes to in the Quart Livre’s dedicatory letter.⁸¹

Rabelais’s anxiety about the printing of his text and the ubiquity of error and piracy in the printing process suggest that the sixteenth-century printed book was not necessarily conceived in terms of fidelity, reliability, and fixity. Adrian Johns has influentially argued that the idea of the printed book as stable and reliable – and identical to all other editions of the same book – was not a result of the printing process, but rather a product of it, created and maintained by the printing industry. ‘Fixity may not be an inherent quality but a transitive one’, he argues – produced by the expectations and acknowledgement of readers and other users of books.⁸² Margreta de Grazia argues similarly that fixity was not characteristic of a process whose principal innovation was moveable type: it was, on the contrary, less stable than a stamp, a block, or a signet.⁸³ Editorial intervention during the printing process meant that a single edition could have two or more states, and a single print run would not turn out identical books. Introducing the errata list of his Controverses des sexes masculin et feminin, Gratien du Pont explained his book had at least four states: ‘il fault noter que toutz les Livres de ceste Impression sont subgectz au present Errata/car les ungs ont este corrigez presque au commencement de Limpression/les aultres vers le millieu/les aultres vers la fin/et les aultres poinct’.⁸⁴

For sixteenth-century readers, the early printed book may not have been the ‘tombeau pétrifié’ that Jeanneret suggests, and the frozen words not as dead or inert as they have been described. Rather, they exhibit a kind of uncanny liveliness as they pop like roasted chestnuts, whinny like horses, or bang like drums, evoking the recalcitrant agency of type described by a twentieth-century compositor at the Clarendon Press in Oxford when asked by an author about the stubborn persistence of errors. If you dared to enter the press on a Saturday night, he said, pieces of type could be seen dancing: ‘Presumably, they had escaped from the locked forms, and some of them had eventually climbed back into the wrong positions’.⁸⁵ This lively agency brings Rabelais’s frozen words closer to Pantagruel’s creative philosophical and poetic conjectures than might at first appear.⁸⁶ Like the unsettling fizzing of the Decretals or the uncanny power of the fetish, they straddle the border between word and thing, matter and spirit. They point us towards the haptic, sensory, and unpredictable experience of reading, interpreting, and handling printed books.

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Notes on contributors

Emily Butterworth

Emily Butterworth is Professor of Early Modern French at King's College London. Her most recent book is Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022).

Notes

1 F. Rabelais, Quart livre, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by M. Huchon and F. Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994; henceforth OC), ch. 55, p. 667. The distinction between voix and sons, or voces and soni, is drawn from Ammonius’s commentary on Aristotle: OC, p. 1571 n. 5. My grateful thanks to the delegates of the Society’s conference in September 2023, the EMFS anonymous reader, and Sara Barker, for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

2 Critical interpretations of what Pantagruel is doing here vary. Michel Jeanneret describes his speculations as polysemic play (‘Les Paroles dégelées (Rabelais, Quart Livre, 48–65),’ Littérature, 17 (1975), 14–30), while Edwin Duval argues that he is simply trying to calm his friends by offering reassuring but unlikely scenarios, and that he himself is as afraid as they are: The Design of Rabelais’s ‘Quart Livre de Pantagruel’ (Geneva: Droz, 1998), p. 37.

3 Both of these verbal phrases evoke adages collected by Erasmus: ‘dare verba’, Erasmus, Adages Ii1 to Iv100. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 31, trans. by M. M. Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), Iv49 (p. 426): ‘This occurs everywhere throughout the authors, with the meaning of cheating’. ‘Verba importat Hermodorus’ (Hermodorus is an importer of words), Erasmus, Adages IIi1 to IIvi100. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 33, trans. by R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), IIvi100 (p. 338): ‘For words are Hermodorus’s merchandise’.

4 In the Topics, Aristotle uses white and black to indicate words’ clarity: see M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 435.

5 J. H. Anderson, Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 17; T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 21. On the shifting definitions of res and verba in the period, see A. C. Howell, ‘Res et Verba,’ English Literary History, 13 (1946), 131–42.

6 Anderson, p. 13.

7 The critical literature on this episode is vast, but for legal contexts, see Screech, pp. 411–12; for linguistic theory, Anderson, pp. 7–42; for Platonic philosophy, T. W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 151–86; for the physiological context of the voice, G. Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 1–19.

8 Duval, p. 38; see also A. F. Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe: A Study of Rabelais’s ‘Quart Livre’ (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2000), p. 136; G. Defaux, ‘A propos de paroles gelées et dégelées (Quart Livre 55–56) : “plus hault sens” ou “lectures plurielles” ?,’ in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed. by R. C. La Charité (Lexington: French Forum, 1986), pp. 155–77; and Jeanneret.

9 Jeanneret, pp. 18, 20.

10 Ibid., p. 20.

11 See J. Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), and on Derridean interpretations of Renaissance texts, J. O’Brien, ‘Introduction: The Time of Theory,’ in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Literature, ed. by J. O’Brien (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 14–23.

12 Plutarch, ‘How a Man May Become Aware of his Progress in Virtue,’ in Moralia, Volume 1, trans. by F. C. Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), pp. 400–57 (78F, p. 421).

13 Anderson, p. 8.

14 Plutarch, p. 421 (79A).

15 T. Cave, Live Artefacts: Literature in a Cognitive Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 22 n. 4. Other suggestions for Rabelais’s source are Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses; ‘The Ignorant Book Collector’ is a very different kind of intertext, telling the story in satirical, rather than elegiac, mode.

16 Lucian, ‘The Ignorant Book-Collector,’ in Works, Volume 3, trans. by A. N. Harman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), pp. 173–211 (p. 195).

17 Aristophanes, Frogs. Assemblywomen. Wealth, trans. by J. Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 1–235 (pp. 134–35, 208–09). Rabelais owned a Latin translation of Aristophanes: see O. Pédeflous, ‘Sur la bibliothèque de Rabelais,’ Arts et Savoirs, 10 (2018) <https://journals.openedition.org/aes/1425> [accessed January 5, 2024].

18 B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. by C. Singleton, ed. by D. Javith (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 113.

19 Jeanneret, pp. 17, 19.

20 Critics have interpreted the episode as a satirical dismissal of oracular truth: see Duval, p. 39; Berry, p. 136.

21 ‘Cunctus autem populus videbat voces’, ‘And all the people saw the voices’, Exodus 20:18. For the quotation of this verse in legal glosses, see Screech, p. 434.

22 Erasmus explains the proverb ‘Daedali opera (The works of Daedalus)’ as ‘something […] done or made with unusual skill’, but also (or alternatively) ‘someone [who] is unreliable and inconstant’. Adages IIi1 to IIvi100, IIiii62, p. 169.

23 On Lucretius’s materialism as an alternative to Platonic mimesis, see J. Hock, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), pp. 16–21 (‘Words and Things’).

24 On the presence of Plato’s Cratylus in the frozen words episode, see Anderson, pp. 9–11; Reeser, pp. 151–58; Screech, pp. 416, 424–26.

25 M. de Grazia, ‘Words as Things,’ Shakespeare Studies, 28 (2000), 231–35 (p. 231).

26 See W. Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,’ Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 13 (1987), 23–45; part of a series of three articles on the origin and development of the fetish in Res and reprinted as The Problem of the Fetish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

27 J. Cartier, Relations, ed. by M. Bideaux (Montreal: Presses de l’université de Montréal, 1983), ch. 19, p. 114.

28 Adages Ii1 to Iv100, Iv49, p. 426.

29 Pietz, p. 23.

30 A. R. Jones and P. Stallybrass, ‘Fetishisms and Renaissances,’ in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. by C. Mazzio and D. Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20–35 (p. 21).

31 On the impact of cynical exchange practices in the Americas on European gift-giving practice, see N. Z. Davis, ‘Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?,’ in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. by G. Warkentin and C. Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 20–32 (pp. 22–4).

32 Jones and Stallybrass, p. 27.

33 On the object-like qualities of ritual words in Anakalangese culture, see W. Keane, ‘The Value of Words and the Meaning of Things in Eastern Indonesian Exchange,’ Man, 29 (1994), 605–29 (p. 605).

34 See Berry, ch. 2 (‘“L’Isle Medamothi”: Rabelais’s Itineraries of Anxiety’), pp. 47–67.

35 M. Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don : forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,’ in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1999), pp. 147–64. On the type of exchange he calls ‘potlatch’: ‘c’est le principe de la rivalité et de l’antagonisme qui domine toutes ces pratiques […] cette prestation revêt de la part du chef une allure agonistique’ (p. 152).

36 Although it is not my focus here, there is considerable discussion in the critical literature of the difference between ‘object’ and ‘thing’. See, for example, B. Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), 1–22 (p. 3).

37 Anderson, p. 239 n. 15.

38 ‘[The voice] consists of (1) the body tissues of lungs, larynx, and mouth, (2) moving molecules of air, and (3) the cartilage, flesh, bones, and nerves of the ear’. B. R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 222. Bloom, p. 2.

39 Bloom, p. 6.

40 For an atomic account of sound, see Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. by W. H. D. Rouse and M. F. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), Book 4, ll. 524–632 (pp. 316–25): ‘every sound and voice is heard, when creeping into the ears they have struck with their body upon the sense’ (4.524–25, p. 317).

41 De Grazia, ‘Words as Things’, p. 231; H. Carter, A View of Early Typography up to about 1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 5; quoted in D. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1.

42 Calligraphy and Printing in the Sixteenth Century: Dialogue attributed to Christopher Plantin in French and Flemish Facsimile, ed. and trans. by R. Nash (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus Museum, 1964), facsimile of Dialogue 9, ‘L’Escriture et l’imprimerie,’ La Premiere, et la Seconde Partie des Dialogues francois, pour les jeunes enfans, 1567, p. 236. For early accounts of typecasting, see Carter, pp. 5–22. On gendered descriptions of the process, see M. de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes,’ in Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2, ed. by T. Hawkes (London: Routledge, 2005 [1996]), pp. 65–96 (pp. 85–8), and R. Stenner, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 38–9.

43 Calligraphy and Printing, p. 240.

44 J. Veyrin-Forrer, ‘Fabriquer un livre au XVI^e siècle,’ in Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 1: Le livre conquérant, ed. by H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier with J.-P. Vinet (Paris: Promodis, 1982), pp. 279–301 (p. 279).

45 S. Rawles and M. A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 (Geneva: Droz, 1987; hereafter NRB), p. 249, no. 48, Quart Livre (Lyon: Baltasar Aleman, 1552). See also M. Huchon, Rabelais grammarien : De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité (Geneva: Droz, 1981), p. 71. Baltasar Aleman is only known for this edition of the Quart Livre, and Raphaël Cappellen argues the name is surely a pseudonym: ‘À l’enseigne du masque : Imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs de Rabelais de 1552 à 1588,’ Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, 82–3 (2016), 65–115 (pp. 73–4).

46 J. Misson, ‘Kludging Type: Some Workarounds in Early English Print,’ in Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Mistakes and In-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450–1650), ed. by G. Della Rocca de Candal, A. Grafton and P. Sachet, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 70–9 (p. 71). Tiers Livre des faictz et dictz Heroïques du noble Pantagruel (Paris: Chrestien Wechel, 1546), p. 18 (NRB, p. 45).

47 K. Chenoweth, The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 128.

48 M. de Montaigne, Essais, ed. by P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 2004), ‘De l’experience,’ III.13, p. 1083; De Grazia, ‘Imprints’, pp. 76–83.

49 N. Le Cadet, ‘Le Monde de l’édition humaniste et la naissance du Pantagruel (ch. xxx),’ Reforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, 82–3 (2016), 25–44 (p. 25).

50 N. Z. Davis, ‘Le Monde de l’imprimerie humaniste: Lyon,’ in Histoire de l’édition française, pp. 255–77 (p. 263).

51 NRB, pp. 520, 527. J. Manardi, Epistolarum medicinalium Tomus Secundus (Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1532), NRB no. 104; Hippocrates, Galen, Hippocratis ac Galeni libri aliquot, ex recognitione Francisci Rabelaesi (Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1532), NRB no. 105.

52 H. D. L. Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected Papers on Sixteenth-Century Typefaces, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2008), vol. 1, p. 167.

53 On Rabelais’s corrections on the 1552 edition, see OC, pp. 1479–80; and Huchon, pp. 373–89.

54 C. M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 4. On the aesthetic decisions of the mise-en-page, see also B. Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

55 G. Tory, Champ Fleury (Paris: for Geoffroy Tory and Giles Gourmont, [1529]). On Champ Fleury, see Chenoweth, ch. 3 (pp. 87–135); T. Conley, The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 9–10; and T. Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), ch. 2 (pp. 62–87).

56 E. Tabourot, Les Bigarrures du Seigneur des Accords (premier livre), facsimile of the 1588 edition, ed. by Francis Goyet (Geneva: Droz, 1986).

57 M. A. Screech, ‘The First Edition of Pantagruel,’ Etudes rabelaisiennes, 15 (1980), 31–42. On the French shift from gothic to roman typefaces and the development of roman in Paris in the 1530s, see Vervliet, pp. 9–62; Chenoweth, pp. 163–64; and Conley, Graphic Unconscious, p. 42 (pp. 41–69 on Rabelais).

58 S. Rawles, ‘La Typographie de Rabelais : Réflexions bibliographiques sur des éditions faussement attribuées,’ in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, ed. by J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, Études rabelaisiennes, 21 (1988), pp. 37–48 (p. 48).

59 OC, p. 1574 n. 6. See ‘4^e chanson sur la Bataille de Marignan,’ Recueil de chants historiques français depuis le XII^e jusqu’au XVIII^e siècle, ed. by A. Le Roux de Lincy. Deuxième Série. XVI^e siècle (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1842), pp. 65–7: ‘Tricque, tricque, tricque, trique, / Tricque, tricque, tricque, tricque, / Trac, tricque, tricque, tricque, / Chipe, chope, torche, lorgne, / Chipe, chope, serre, serre, serre’ (p. 66).

60 A. Smyth, Material Texts in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 3.

61 A. Thevet, Les Vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins, et payens (Paris: la vefve I. Kervert and Guillaume Chaudiere, 1584), ‘Sur le pourtrait de Jean Guttemberg’, p. 516^v. Plantin does not dwell on the labour of the printshop: see Stenner, p. 50. More broadly, Adrian Johns has argued that printing is ‘dedicated to effacing its own traces’: The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 2.

62 Smyth, p. 5.

63 Calligraphy and Printing, pp. 242–44.

64 K. Kadue, Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

65 M. Clément, ‘Rabelais et ses privilèges : un autre accès à la pratique auctoriale ?,’ in Inextinguible Rabelais, ed. by M. Huchon, N. Le Cadet and R. Menini (Paris: Garnier, 2021), pp. 95–117.

66 Clément, p. 101; for privilèges issued to authors, p. 97.

67 Le Quart Livre des faicts et dicts Heroiques du bon Pantagruel. Composé par M. François Rabelais docteur en Medicine (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1552), p. [a vii]^v; OC, p. 344.

68 Tiers Livre ch. 22, in OC, pp. 419, 420.

69 See Clément, p. 102; NRB, p. 172.

70 OC, p. 1358.

71 Clément, p. 97.

72 OC, p. 1483 n. 5. Le Cinquiesme Livre des faictz et dictz du noble Pantagruel. Auquelz sont comprins, les grans Abus, & d’esordonêe vie de plusieurs Estatz de ce monde (1549), NRB no. 111.

73 Pantagruel, Roy des Dipsodes, restitué à son naturel […] plus Les merveilleuses navigations du disciple de Pantagruel, dict Panurge (Lyon: Estienne Dolet, 1542), NRB no. 13.

74 Quoted from the four-page carton in the Bodleian Library and reproduced in NRB (no. 25): Grands Annales tresveritables des Gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua & Pantagruel son filz, Roy des Dipsodes (Lyon: Pierre de Tournes, 1542). See Huchon, p. 96.

75 NRB, p. 154.

76 Smyth, p. 5; McKitterick, p. iii.

77 Thevet, p. 516^v.

78 Smyth, pp. 6–7; Veyrin-Forrer, p. 292.

79 Tiers livre (Paris, 1546), p. a ii^r. A groove in the sort would tell the compositor which way up it should sit; mis-sorted type is thus more likely than compositor error in an experienced print house. Thanks to Sara Barker for this information.

80 ‘Id quod si usquam alibi uitio uerti solet, est etiam in medicorum libris piaculare. In quibus uocula unica, uel addita, uel expuncta, quin et apiculus inuersus, aut præpostere adscriptus, multa hominum milia haud raro neci dedit’. OC, pp. 983–84; quoted in M. B. Kline, Rabelais and the Age of Printing (Geneva: Droz, 1963), p. 9. Inuersus can mean, of words, misapplied or even ambiguous; but its primary meaning is ‘upside down’.

81 ‘[…] par moymesmes à l’exemple du Phœnix, seroit le bois sec amassé, et le feu allumé, pour en icelluy me brusler’ (OC, p. 520). In a 1542 addition to the Pantagruel Prologue, and in the 1548 Quart Livre Prologue, Rabelais makes a rather sombre joke along the same lines: ‘je dy et maintiens jusques au feu exclusivement’ (p. 717; see Pantagruel, p. 214).

82 Johns, p. 19.

83 De Grazia, ‘Imprints’, p. 92.

84 G. du Pont, Controverses des sexes masculin et fememin (Toulouse: Jacques Colomiez, 1534), [CCCvi]^r. Quoted in Veyrin-Forrer, who adds a ‘ne’ before ‘sont subgectz’, which shifts the emphasis (p. 294).

85 The story is recounted in ‘Introduction,’ Printing and Misprinting, p. 6.

86 My references to liveliness are inspired rather obliquely by Cave, Live Artefacts, especially his reflections on Orpheus’s head (pp. 20–8).