Rabelais, Fischart, and Urquhart at Thélème Ambiguity and usefulness of the utopian model

The highly ambiguous episode of the Abbey of Thélème provides us with a case study of translatio studii, which succeeds perfectly in adapting Rabelais’s text to cultural, historic, and personal parameters. Fischart and Urquhart transpose the episode to make it, respectively, an antipapist satire and a prison lament, thereby emphasizing both the malleability and the ongoing relevance of Rabelais’s work, as well as the creative imitation that it inspires.