Recording of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2009, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Tuck describes his lecture: "Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, is one of the great masterpieces of European literature. It was published serially, beginning in the 1530's. It is a wild, brawling, bewildering, crazily funny book, notorious in its own time for its alleged atheism and obscenity. Its influence on subsequent prose fiction has been enormous, and it was a crucial event in the formation of the modern French language. Rabelais was a hugely learned man, a humanist and a disciple of Erasmus, and his book is enthusiastically strewn with allusions to Plato, Homer, and other Greek authors that had been newly rediscovered in the early Renaissance. But few learned authors have worn their learning as lightly as Rabelais, and the book is also uncannily modern, edgy and subversive. Until recently it was a fixture on the reading list at St. John's. I hope to show that it is a book we cannot do without. The lecture will not presume any previous acquaintance with the book, and it will be R-rated (for language)."