The production of poetry in the 16th century did not outdo the other genres in quantity. Readers turned above all to works in prose, for accounts of voyages, lives of saints, and collections of diverse leçons or lectures (readings). Prose was slow in freeing itself from the heavy yoke thrown over it by the medieval humanists. But with Jean Lemaire de Belges prose became eloquent, and with François Rabelais it became a prodigious domain of experimentation. Rabelais’s writing found some of its most appreciative readers and critics in the 20th century, not least the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who ...(100 of 41004 words)