Download or read book Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic Hermetic Tradition written by George Mallary Masters and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1969-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Professor Masters looks beyond the few critical attempts that heretofore have analyzed only isolated aspects of Platonism and Hermetism in Rabelaisian literature. He examines the closely related themes of Platonism, the Dionysian mysteries, and the Hermetic sciences in Rabelais's work and concludes that Rabelais shared with the Platonic-Hermetic tradition both its dialectic and perception of man's position in the universe. In the perspective of Platonic dialectic, Professor Masters analyzes Rabelaisian allegory, symbolism, and imagery as a play on appearance and reality. Through the allegorical myths of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais rejects the seemingly dichotomous extremes of materialism and ascetic spiritualism, while his philosophy of Pantagrue?lisme shows a positive acceptance of both the physical world and contemplative thought. Through the symbolism of wine, Rabelais manifests the Platonic ideal of Love-Harmony-Order on the literal level of conviviality, in the philosophical dialogue of the symposium, and in the intuitive dialectic of Socratic contemplation. In Rabelais's view, man can achieve self-knowledge only through reasonable control and by actively establishing a balance with society, nature, and God. The magus may diabolically use the "sciences" of astrology, magic, alchemy, and the Cabala in an attempt to subject the world to his own will, or he may achieve unity with himself and his total environment by restoring in himself the harmonious order he finds in the cosmos. In an appendix, Professor Masters examines the continuity of the several themes of the Platonic-Hermetic tradition as they occur in the five books of the Rabelaisian corpus. He concludes, as two corollaries of the main thesis, that their constant recurrence demonstrates the thematic unity of the five books and the authenticity of Book Five.
Download or read book Nature Loves to Hide An Alternative History of Philosophy written by Paul S. MacDonald and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An alternative history of philosophy has endured as a shadowy parallel to standard histories, although it shares many of the same themes. It has its own founding texts in the late ancient Hermetica, from whence flowed three broad streams of thought: alchemy, astrology, and magic. These thinkers' attitude toward philosophy is not one of detached speculation but of active engagement, even intervention. It appeared again in the European Middle Ages, in the Renaissance with Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Ficino, and Bruno; and in the early modern period with John Dee, Robert Fludd, Jacob Böhme, Thomas Browne, Kenelm Digby, van Helmont, and Isaac Newton. In the 18th-19th centuries, this book considers Lichtenberg's Fragments, Berkeley's Siris, Swedenborg, Hegel, von Baader, and great Romantics such as Novalis, Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, and E. A. Poe, as well as Nietzsche; and in the 20th century it turns to the great modernist literature of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musil, Ernst Bloch, and P. K. Dick.
Download or read book Etudes rabelaisiennes written by Marie-Madeleine Fontaine and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 1983 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renasissance written by Frances A. Yates and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Volume X of ten of the selected works of Frances Yates. Originally published in 1984, this collection of thirty-five essays.
Download or read book Rabelais s Contempt for Fortune written by Timothy Haglund and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francois Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel at the height of the Renaissance, when top-caliber thinkers aimed to unite the best of freshly rediscovered ancient Greco-Roman theory and practice and transform politics. Through his work, Rabelais offers his unique understanding of ancient philosophy and political thought. This book considers the role of fortune as the key to understanding Rabelais, much in the manner of contemporaries such as Machiavelli. The two could not be more different, however. Throughout his writings, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess Fortuna through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Rabelais’s headstrong character Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await. Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction, given in chapter 25 of The Prince, to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme may beat him. Through this dramatization, Panurge begins to hear the merits of viewing fortune as an intractable part of life that must be shouldered with the proper inner disposition rather than as an object susceptible of human conquest.
Download or read book The Rabelaisian Mythologies written by Max Gauna and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 4 examines in detail the various myths of the fourth book and suggests that in it Rabelais propounds a radically unorthodox syncretism in which the poetic attractions of Platonic and Plutarchan demonology are preponderant, in which Christ Himself may be seen as the greatest of the demons, and where the climax of the book shows us the hero Pantagruel in direct communication with his own guardian demon. A short epilogue sums up Gauna's conclusions and suggests reasons for the literary and philosophical attractions of magical Platonism.
Download or read book A Crtitical Bibliography of French Literature V2 16th C written by and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France written by Timothy Chesters and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550-1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. Although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. Chesters describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the 'haunted house', the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné, as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity. It will be of interest to any scholar or student working in the field of early modern European history, literature or thought.
Download or read book Enter Rabelais Laughing written by Barbara C. Bowen and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais written by John O'Brien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, readable account of Rabelais, his work, his thought and his world.
Download or read book Rabelais in Context written by Barbara C. Bowen and published by Summa Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 1993 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Design of Rabelais s written by Edwin M. Duval and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: En analysant le “dessin” du Tiers Livre - sa composition formelle aussi bien que son intention sous-jacente - E. Duval dégage la cohérence profonde d'une œuvre qui passe le plus souvent pour ambiguë et “ménippéenne”. Cette cohérence, qui se manifeste simultanément à deux niveaux (celui du dessin de Pantagruel dans la quête, celui du dessin de Rabelais dans son livre), permet à l'auteur non seulement de résoudre plusieurs apories de la critique rabelaisienne, mais de découvrir dans le Tiers Livre des dimensions et des ironies inaperçues jusqu'à présent.
Download or read book A Companion to Fran ois Rabelais written by Bernd Renner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.
Download or read book Shakespeare and religio mentis written by Jane Everingham Nelson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark interdisciplinary study shines the light of religious Hermetism on Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Othello and The Tempest and reveals the ‘religion of the mind’ found in the Corpus Hermeticum to be a source of Shakespeare’s understanding of human psychology.
Download or read book Etudes rabelaisiennes written by and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 2015 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Liber 420 written by Chris Bennett and published by TrineDay. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although little known, cannabis and other psychoactive plants held a prominent and important role in the Occult arts of Alchemy and Magic, as well as being used in ritual initiations of certain secret societies. Find out about the important role cannabis played in helping to develop modern medicines through alchemical works. Cannabis played a pivotal role in spagyric alchemy, and appears in the works of alchemists such as Zosimos, Avicenna, Llull, Paracelsus, Cardano and Rabelais. Cannabis also played a pivotal role in medieval and renaissance magic and recipes with instructions for its use appear in a number of influential and important grimoires such as the Picatrix, Sepher Raxiel: Liber Salomonis, and The Book of Oberon. Could cannabis be the Holy Grail? With detailed historical references, the author explores the allegations the Templars were influenced by the hashish ingesting Assassins of medieval Islam, and that myths of the Grail are derived from the Persian traditions around the sacred beverage known as haoma, which was a preparation of cannabis,opium and other drugs. Many of the works discussed, have never been translated into English, or published in centuries. The unparalleled research in this volume makes it a potential perennial classic on the subjects of both medieval and renaissance history of cannabis, as well as the role of plants in the magical and occult traditions.
Download or read book Echoland written by Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book follows several major European literary «echoes» still reverberating since the mysterious emergence of such archetypal figures as Faust, Hamlet, Quixote, and Don Juan alongside lingering ancient and medieval protagonists in the Renaissance. Four centuries of attempts to redefine «modern» identity are traced against the evolution of a new genre of totalizing encyclopaedic literature, the «humoristic» tradition which re-weaves the positive and negative strands of the European, and today also New World, «grand narrative.» The book's method, inspired by Joyce, is to «listen» to recurrent motifs in the cultural flow from Humanism to Postmodernism for clues to an identity transcending the personal.
