knowledge. The price of conquering the new world of gigantic 
dimensions was simply to enter Pantagruel’s mouth. Erich 
Auerbach devotes the eleventh chapter of Mimesis: The  
Representation of Reality in Western Literature  to “The World in 
Pantagruel’s Mouth.” Auerbach notes (p. 269) some of the 
predecessors of Rabelais’ fantasy in order to do justice to the 
originality of Rabelais who “maintains a constant interplay of 
different locales, different themes and different levels of style.” 
Like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy  later on, Rabelais 
follows the “principle of the promiscuous intermingling of the 
categories of event, experience, and knowledge, as well as of 
dimensions and styles.”

     Again, Rabelais is like a medieval glossator of the Roman 
law in supporting his absurd opinions with a welter of learning 
which manifests “rapid shifts between a multiplicity of