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This chapter tackles perhaps the most salient near-shipwreck in Renaissance French literature to the modern reader: Rabelais’s storm scene of the Quart Livre, situating it between two of its closest relatives within the broader family of Renaissance shipwreck texts: one of them familiar, the other perhaps less so. First, some important features of one of Rabelais’s major sources (Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’ dialogue) are set out, both in order to show how the latter responds to the ship of fools tradition, and to establish the ways in which it too establishes conventions for writing about shipwreck. The reading of the famous Rabelaisian storm scene itself is focussed on the figure of Panurge, arguing that it is this character more than any other element that sets Rabelais’s (near-)shipwreck scene apart from its Renaissance relatives. Staying with Panurge, we then turn to what may be thought of as a rewriting or re-imagining of the Quart Livre storm scene: the beaching of the Thalamège in the Cinquiesme Livre. In this third section, the dynamics of co-operation may be seen to inform our understanding of shipwreck survival (whether in the sense of narrowly avoiding it, or of recovering from it) both as it is dramatised directly in Rabelais’s text(s), and as it, in turn, stages the relationship between author, text, and reader.

Chapter 1 shifts from the mire of Erasmus’ textual practices to what may seem the more festive world of François Rabelais, whose association with humanist exuberance and carnivalesque pleasure has, since Bakhtin, become a critical commonplace. This chapter radically moderates existing scholarship on Rabelais by locating a deep concern about the fragility of culture and community at the heart of textual excess in his Tiers Livre and Quart Livre, reading that excess as a crisis to be managed. The chapter shifts the critical focus from famously flowing wine to moments of tempering, pickling, fermentation, and maceration that emerge as creative strategies of textual control, both formal and figurative. Lingering on meticulous descriptions of confectionary practices (the proper way to process and store a mythical herb, the proposal to preserve frozen words in straw, the praxis of pickling oneself to avoid being swept up by passions—practices often described in narration-suspending parentheticals), Rabelais’ books arrest forward progress by attending to microscopic operations of alteration. These modes of moderate, transformative preservation inform both Rabelais’s self-correcting style and his concern for the correction and maintenance of his readers’ collective health as French national identity was threatened by the first fissures of civil war.

Part IV explores how many of the contexts and strands of tense-use for the dead that have been explored separately so far were combined in practice by two of the greatest vernacular prose writers of the European Renaissance. The first is François Rabelais. This chapter starts by outlining the general economy of tenses with which the dead are referred to in his fictional chronicles. Then, two sequences of Rabelais’s chapters are analysed in detail. Each stretches and tests that economy of tenses in particularly intense ways in order to explore posthumous survival or non-survival. The first sequence is Chapters 3–8 of Pantagruel (1532); the second is Chapters 17–28 of the Quart livre (1552).

In Rabelais’s later books villainy undergoes significant changes. By the time we get to the Quart Livre, Panurge no longer targets women with his violent tricks. The first half of this chapter gives a legal-literary reading of the Chiquanous episode (Quart Livre chs. 12–16), replete with litigation and ‘tragic farce’: here, Panurge’s violent, imaginative villainy is given full rein. The second half of the chapter concentrates on the courtroom drama of Panurge versus the Chats-fourrez (Cinquiesme Livre chs. 11–15). This has echoes of the courtroom scenes of La Farce de Pathelin, but it is no rehash of the latter. The case ends with Panurge resorting not to villainous tricks but to the protocol of venality (espices, legal emoluments offered to magistrates) in order to be acquitted of the charge of illicit vagabondage.