SOURCE: “The Three Temptations of Panurge: Women's Vilification and Christian Humanist Discourse,” in François Rabelais: Critical Assessments, edited by Jean-Claude Carron, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 83-102.

In the following essay, Rigolot discusses the relationship between Rabelais's apparent misogynist treatment of the lady from Paris in Pantagruel and the evangelic humanist ideology which he embraced.

Là vous verrez … petites joyeusettez toutes veritables; ce sont beaux textes d’évangilles en françoys. 

—Rabelais, Pantagruel

For several decades now, the interpretation of Rabelais's works has been greatly influenced by scholarship on Christian humanism and the revival of evangelical thinking in the early sixteenth century. For the last thirty years, serious critical work has been done to establish a horizon of expectation that removes our author from anachronistic libertine or rationalist suspicions and places him squarely, though not exclusively, within the Erasmian brand of humanist culture (Defaux, Duval, Screech...