François Rabelais was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both Protestant theologian John Calvin and from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, diplomat, and Catholic priest, later he became better known as a satirist for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.
The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres, is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words ... into the French language".
Costanzo Festa was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. While he is best known for his madrigals, he also wrote sacred vocal music. He was the first native Italian polyphonist of international renown, and with Philippe Verdelot, one of the first to write madrigals, in the infancy of that most popular of all sixteenth-century Italian musical forms.
Burton Nathan Raffel was an American writer, translator, poet and professor. He is best known for his vigorous translation of Beowulf, still widely used in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Prose from the Old English, The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Essential Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Panurge is one of the principal characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of five novels by François Rabelais. Especially important in the third and fourth books, he is an exceedingly crafty knave, libertine and coward.
Mate Maras is a Croatian translator. He has translated many famous classical and contemporary works from English, Italian and French into Croatian. He is the only man who translated the complete works of William Shakespeare into Croatian. His translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel earned him the grand prix of the French Academy. He wrote the first Croatian rhyming dictionary.
Rabelais and His World is a scholarly work by the 20th century Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It is considered to be a classic of Renaissance studies, and an important work in literary studies and cultural interpretation.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Donald M. Frame, a scholar of French Renaissance literature, was Moore Professor Emeritus of French at Columbia University, where he worked for half a century.
Pierre Vermont was a French composer of the Renaissance, associated with the Sainte-Chapelle. Twelve of his works have survived, including seven motets and five chansons.
Picrochole is a fictional character created by François Rabelais, who attacks the Kingdom of Grandgousier in the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. He gives his name to the war he fights: la guerre picrocholine.
Viktor Grabovskyj, – Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, literary critic, journalist. He is member of the National union of writers of Ukraine and the Honoured Worker of Arts of Ukraine.
Oleksiy Logvynenko was a Ukrainian translator who specialized in translating from German and English.
Rostyslav Dotsenko – Ukrainian translator, literary critic, author of aphorisms and maxims. Member of the National Writers Union of Ukraine. Political prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps.
The Trois petites pièces montées is a suite for small orchestra by Erik Satie, inspired by themes from the novel series Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. It was premiered at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris on February 21, 1920, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. Satie later arranged it for piano four hands and today it is more frequently heard in this version. A typical performance lasts about five minutes.
Michael Andrew Screech, FBA was a cleric and a professor of French literature with special interests in the Renaissance, Montaigne and Rabelais.
Lourche was a French board game that was played in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was played, like backgammon, on a tables board. The rules of the game have been lost, Furetière (1727) describing it simply as a "kind of trictrac game", trictrac being the name given to the board used for tables games. The game is referred to in the English expression 'left in the lurch', parallel to the French demeurer lourche, referring to the hopeless losing position a player of the game could end up in.
Gérard Defaux was a French American writer.
The Great Mare was a gigantic mare that served as a mount for giants in several Renaissance works. Stemming from medieval traditions inspired by Celtic mythology, she first appeared in The Grand and Priceless Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua, written in 1532, in which Merlin created her from bones atop a mountain.
Kostiantyn Mykolaiovych Tyshchenko was a Ukrainian linguist, teacher, translator, Doctor of Philology (1992), and professor (1995). Tyshchenko is the author of more than 240 works on metatheory of linguistics, sign theory of language, linguistic laws, optimization of morphological descriptions of languages, linguopedagogy, problems of language development, Romance and Oriental linguistics, as well as series of articles on studies of German, Slavic, Celtic, Basque, Finnish and Altaic languages. Teacher and polyglot speaking more than two dozen different languages. He lectures on general linguistics and conducts practical courses in French, Italian, Persian, Finnish, Basque, Welsh, and other languages. From 2001 to 2010, he was the head and leading researcher of the Linguistic Educational Museum, which he founded in 1992 at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Professor in the Middle East Department at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Recipient of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2003) and the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2005).
