Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England.

Anne Lake Prescott, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 21 illus. + xviii + 257 pp. $30. ISBN: 0-300-07122-1.

In Imagining Rabelais, Anne Lake Prescott, a scholar whose previous work includes a study of French poetic influence on Renaissance England, examines Francois Rabelais's impact on English Renaissance writers, from the very obscure to the most well-known, in the first half of the seventeenth century, up until, as she puts it, "Thomas Urquhart's obstreperous 1653 translation made him part of English literature" (vii). Her work falls into the general category of reception studies; as a consequence, and by her own admission, the book has very little to say about Rabelais's text itself, and focuses rather on how early modern English writers cited, appropriated, and imagined Rabelais (vii). However, the wealth of textual information Prescott provides and the studies of individual words and stories make of Imagining Rabelais a useful storehouse of knowledge for Rabelais scholars as well. For example, her chapter on para-Rabelaisian material, her chapter on the chapbook giant pre-history of Rabelais's Gargantua, and her brief "interlude" chapter on Panourgia in England supply not only valuable information about the English vicissitudes of Rabelaisian characters, but also include discussions of the way these characters, or the materials that served as their building blocks, circulated informally in early modern Europe prior to and simultaneously with the great encyclopedic French oeuvre, thus demonstrating the extent to which Rabelais himself was a marvelous collector and compiler.

The introduction provides little rationale for the organization of the book, and it is somewhat confusing to find at the book's center something called a "Quicksilver Interlude," the chapter in which Prescott studies the fate of Panurge in England. It would have helped the reader immeasurably to have been informed, in the introduction, of the sets of concerns and issues that provided the particular sequence in which the material is presented and the reasons for the anomalies of an interlude and a coda. Perhaps writing on Rabelais, like his text itself, spills over the traditional borders of chapter headings and neat thematic arrangements. Indeed, the book does not necessarily follow a progression; rather, it seems to be a thematic compilation, focusing on the one hand on specific characters and episodes and, on the other, on issues such as wordplay, the Rabelaisian body, and the English reception of Rabelaisian fantasy, with a coda on Gabriel Harvey's use of Rabelais.

Whereas much of the book presents itself as an exhaustive compilation, particularly interesting are the places where Prescott engages in serious literary interpretation. She brings to light and interprets many obscure and difficult texts, while also delving into questions such as that of the relation between land and the female body in the writings of Robert Hayman and others. In addition, her interpretive forays into the status of early modern authorship and her exploration of the genealogy of the name and character of Panurge contribute significantly to early modern literary history and criticism.

Prescott declares her critical affiliations at the outset, and they are, for the most part, those of an older generation of Rabelais scholars whose names are associated with the institutionalization of Rabelais in U.S. universities: Barbara C. Bowen, Florence Weinberg, Raymond La Charite, and Gerard Defaux, to name just a few. As such, the reader will not find to any great degree the marks of feminist and psychoanalytic influence, or even that of the more elusively identifiable New Historicism. Nevertheless, Prescott's is a solid work of literary history and an invaluable tool for reception studies. Furthermore, for the study of marginal, satiric, and grotesque writings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - written, at times quite wittily, in lucid and accessible prose - Imagining Rabelais provides original and definitive information for early modern scholars of any discipline.

CARLA FRECCERO University of California, Santa Cruz