Rabelais as polymath, naturalist, and astrologer, according to Antoine Le Roy’s Elogia Rabelæsina (BnF, LAT 8704)

In his Elogia Rabelæsina, a Neo-Latin commentary written in the mid-seventeenth century, which remained unpublished and is kept at the BnF (LAT 8704), Antoine Le Roy demonstrates the diversity and profusion of scholarly knowledge deployed by Rabelais by presenting him as a polymath and an omniscient scholar. He verges on exaggeration, even imagination, but he is also often accurate when he addresses the work—rather than the life—of this French humanist writer, and especially his mastery of natural history and astrology.