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writings. This too came late, but once the Sorbonne set up its own press in 1470, French editions and translations of the classics began to appear in large numbers. Robert Gaguin (c. 1433–1501) struck a popular Gallic note by combining Renaissance studies with the burgeoning French nationalism that marked the second half of the fifteenth century. He published his Compendium supra Francorum gestis (1495), a Latin history of France up to the present, taught rhetoric at Paris and produced a treatise on how to enjoy and write Latin verse. He was joined by Guillaume Fichet and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, who toured Italy to pick up the latest scholarship, and by Greek teachers such as Heronymus and Lascaris. Even more influential was Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), who in 1532 published The Right and Proper Institution of the Study of Learning. His theme was that Christendom, itself perfect when pristine, had been buried in “centuries of barbarism,” and it was the task of the present age to “reform the choirs of the antique muses.” The church did not exactly relish this approach, so many of its institutions being associated, in humanist eyes, with the barbarous centuries. Hence when Budé persuaded François I to subsidize the new humanist culture by founding chairs of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, they were grouped in what was called the Collège Royal (later, the Collège de France) outside the control of Paris University. This was the point at which the French literary Renaissance matured, one might almost say exploded.

Some writers, such as François Rabelais (1483–1553) were educated in the old manner. An ordained priest, he is believed to have attended the ultrastrict Collège de Montaigu of the University of Paris, notorious for its stink, floggings and bad food, known as “the cleft between the buttocks of Mother Church.” Like Erasmus, who also attended it, he was unhappy there, though it must be said that other alumni, such as Jean Cauvin, the great heresiarch, and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, glorified its teaching—but these judgments tell us as much about the temperaments of the four men as about the institution. Rabelais qualified as a doctor. This was an area where French studies had been revolutionized by contacts and experience during the Italian campaigns. Ambroise Paré (1510–90), who served in one of them, went on to become perhaps the greatest physiologist of the age. He settled in Lyons, a town colonized by Italian bankers—on François I’s death it was said that the crown owed twice its annual income to the Lyons bankers—who brought with them the trappings of the Italian Renaissance. Rabelais wrote extensively in Latin and French on a variety of subjects, including medicine, but it is his seriocomic masterpiece, published over twenty years in five parts but usually known as Gargantua and Pantagruel, a compendium of humanism, bawdy humor, satire and description, that made its way into French hearts. He covered almost every aspect of French society, from peasants to academics, from merchants and lawyers to courtiers, and he wrote vivid, terse, expressive and powerful French, with an enormous vocabulary, using dialect, slang and neologisms. It would be going too far to say he invented French as a literary language, as Dante had invented Italian. Rather, he demonstrated its enormous potentialities and made the French excited about their linguistic heritage for the first time. The church condemned him; civil authorities ordered his books to be prosecuted and burned; the Sorbonne was unremittingly hostile. But the court and the literate people loved both the fun and the savage criticisms of society, and the huge, untidy book served as inspiration to writers as diverse as Molière and Voltaire, besides becoming a byword for iniquity throughout the Anglo-Saxon and northern European world.

Younger writers benefited from the educational reforms carried out by Budé with François I’s blessing. Jean Dorat, first professor of Greek at the new college, numbered among his pupils Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), who sought