Lucien Febvre's magisterial study of sixteenth century religious
and intellectual history, published in 1942, is at long last
available in English, in a translation that does it full justice.
The book is a modern classic. Febvre, founder with Marc Bloch of
the journal Annales, was one of France's leading historians, a
scholar whose field of expertise was the sixteenth century. This
book, written late in his career, is regarded as his masterpiece.
Despite the subtitle, it is not primarily a study of Rabelais; it
is a study of the mental life, the mentalite, of a whole age.
Febvre worked on the book for ten years. His purpose at first was
polemical: he set out to demolish the notion that Rabelais was a
covert atheist, a freethinker ahead of his time. To expose the
anachronism of that view, he proceeded to a close examination of
the ideas, information, beliefs, and values of Rabelais and his
contemporaries. He combed archives and local records, compendia of
popular lore, the work of writers from Luther and Erasmus to
Ronsard, the verses of obscure neo-Latin poets. Everything was
grist for his mill: books about comets, medical texts, philological
treatises, even music and architecture. The result is a work of
extraordinary richness of texture, enlivened by a wealth of
concrete details-a compelling intellectual portrait of the period
by a historian of rare insight, great intelligence, and vast
learning. Febvre wrote with Gallic flair. His style is informal,
often witty, at times combative, and colorful almost to a fault.
His idiosyncrasies of syntax and vocabulary have defeated many who
have tried to read, let alone translate, the French text. Beatrice
Gottlieb has succeeded in rendering his prose accurately and
readably, conveying a sense of Febvre's strong, often argumentative
personality as well as his brilliantly intuitive feeling for
Renaissance France.
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