A period in European history marked by efforts to reform the Christian Church
How Italian etiquette spread north of the Alps, the fashions of Germany, England and France, attitudes to cleanliness and bathing, the Protestant household and its furniture, family size and child mortality, food and drink, festivals, sports and games, and the rise of dance as a social art.
How music pervaded European life from the village to the royal court, the variety of instruments of the age, the lute and its tuning troubles, the viols, the invention of keyboard instruments, and the first steps of independent instrumental music and music printing.
How folk song fed church music, the rise of the Flemish school from Machaut and Dunstable to Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez, the spread of Flemish composers across Europe, music at the French court, the Spanish school, Heinrich Isaac, and the career of Orlando di Lasso.
How the Reformation transformed church music, Luther's love of polyphony and his first Protestant hymnal, the shift from Latin masses to congregational song, the contrasting views of Zwingli and Calvin, and the role of the Marot-Goudimel psalms in French Protestantism.
The papal choir and Catholic patronage of music, the church's long suspicion of ornate polyphony, Erasmus's complaint, the Council of Trent debate, the career of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and the legend of the Pope Marcellus Mass, his later works and his place in the history of sacred music.
The economics of printing and authorship after Gutenberg, the typefaces of Garamond, the printing centers of Germany and France, the fate of Etienne Dolet, the Estienne dynasty, bookbinding and libraries, and the collapse of German schools and universities in the early Reformation.
Melanchthon's school reforms, the Protestant takeover of German universities, Sturm's gymnasium, the damage to English schools, the Collège de France, universities in Catholic countries, student life and the education of women, and the educational ideas of Sir Thomas Elyot and Juan Luis Vives.
How Renaissance scholars recovered the classical world: Guillaume Bude and the revival of Roman law and Greek studies, the combative philologist Julius Caesar Scaliger, and Jacques Amyot's French Plutarch and its influence on Montaigne, Shakespeare and French character.
The life of Rabelais from his Franciscan childhood through his Greek studies, medical career in Montpellier and Lyons, the rise of Pantagruel and Gargantua, the protection of the du Bellay family, repeated condemnations by the Sorbonne, and his final years as priest of Meudon.
A guide to the first book of Rabelais's Gargantua: the prologue, the giant's birth and education, the war with Picrochole, the warrior-monk Friar John, and the abbey of Theleme with its single rule, "Do what you will."
Gargantua's letter on humanist education, the emergence of the trickster Panurge as the true center of Rabelais's later books, the question of marriage in the Third Book, the satire of Jupiter's complaint in the Fourth, and the voyage to the Temple of the Holy Bottle.
The meaning behind Rabelais's comedy, his invention of language and his coarseness, his borrowings and originality, his satire of monks, lawyers and scholastics, the debate over his beliefs, the philosophy of "Pantagruelism," and his influence in France and England.
