The Nature and Sources of Rabelais’s Hebrew Learning
François Rabelais’s works contain several Hebrew-derived names and references to Jewish medieval literature. The sources of this material have been the subject of debate for many decades. This article argues that Rabelais was never relying on any independent knowledge of Hebrew, but that he borrowed...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc.
2023
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| In: |
The sixteenth century journal
Year: 2023, Volume: 54, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 41-72 |
| Further subjects: | B
Hebrew literature
B Polyglot Bibles B Jewish literature B POLYGLOT texts, selections, quotations, etc B RABELAIS, Francois, 1495-1553 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | François Rabelais’s works contain several Hebrew-derived names and references to Jewish medieval literature. The sources of this material have been the subject of debate for many decades. This article argues that Rabelais was never relying on any independent knowledge of Hebrew, but that he borrowed his Hebrew learning for the most part from intermediary books in French and Latin. The most important of these was the lexicon of the Complutensian Polyglot (1515), a landmark of Hebraist study that furnished Rabelais with a treasury of transliterated Hebrew names and their meanings. In short, rather than being evidence of any independent contact with Jews or their writings, Rabelais’s Hebrew passages show us how an intelligent amateur profited from the rapid advances that had been made by Christian scholars of Hebrew in the first decades of the sixteenth century |
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| ISSN: | 2326-0726 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The sixteenth century journal
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1086/727944 |