In a Memorable Passage on the philosophy of art, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that the human subject's power to act and to perceive as a separate being arises from a body at once discrete unto itself, yet continuous with the world around it. “This initial paradox cannot but produce others,” he continues. “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself“.

At his festival in 1513 the talking statue Pasquino took the character of Apollo to celebrate the election of Leo X and to predict a golden age of patronage and poetry. “I used to be an exile,“ Pasquino/Apollo remarks, “But I'm back in Leo's reign. / So burn your midnight oil, boys, / And follow in my train, / For no one leaves my Leo / Without a handsome gain. / Bards will sing for prizes, / And they'll not sing in vain.“ The new era lived up to Pasquino's expectations, for the Roman humanists were rewarded and entertained not only in the papal court but also, less formally, in the vigne of numerous Maecenases and fellow poets, where they came together in literary groups, or sodalities, to dine, exchange their poetry, and celebrate the shared ideals of the humanist community.

In the Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as part of their Palm Sunday liturgical celebration, various London parishes purchased or rented costumes, wigs, and props for prophets, and paid to build scaffolds for them to stand on (“pageanttes“). Six other cities too had Palm Sunday prophets between 1498 and 1559 and it is perhaps significant that in all these places a substantial tradition of religious dissent existed. It is in London, however, that such Palm Sunday celebrations are first recorded and most numerous.

On Thursday, 17 February 1558, King Henri II was to come to the Paris Hotel de Ville with Francois de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and have dinner with the municipal council. This was on rather short notice (the king had signified his intention on 8 February); but then, it was not supposed to be a solemn entree, only a banquet. In addition to the hearty pleasures of a Jeudi Gras, there was a lot to celebrate, most notably the recent (8 January) capture of Calais and the fort of Guignes by the duke, which had put an end to over four centuries of English presence on French soil. The banquet in the decorated Grande Salle was supposed to be the main event, but the aldermen wanted more.

Recent Research into Early modern social groups in which women gained access to literary language has focused on the coteries in which they learned to perform alongside men, improvising poems later printed in books.1 The typical coterie in Italy, through which women such as Veronica Franco made their way into print, was the humanist academy centered around a court or a group of urban noblemen, such as the Venier academy in Venice. In sixteenth-century France such groups took two forms: the provincial salon attended by professional men—humanist lawyers, diplomats, doctors, publishers—as in Lyon and Poitiers, and the aristocratic salons linked to the court.

The Renaissance is Protean, forcing us to fix it with descriptive labels or bracket it with interpretive structures in order to make any sense of it. Recent works on Rabelais—himself a shifting and many faceted figure—not only illustrate this tendency but also illuminate the need for new interpretative models of the French Renaissance. Whereas some of these works attempt to fix Rabelais with the “humanist/humanism” label, others attempt to bracket him with post-modern interpretative structures, generally blending phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism. And whereas some of these works unwittingly reveal the poverty of their interpretive frameworks, others point the way toward a new one that takes Rabelais's own cultural milieu more seriously.