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Defence and IHustration of *#tlzqm9 the French Language (1549), Rabelais was one kids Jordan shoes free shipping of the few French men of learning who had dared write books in the language of the marketplace. Luxuriating in the vulgar tongue, Rabelais makes his book a showcase for its fresh eloquence. Exploiting the exclamations, hyperboles, and obscenities of the marketplace, he never uses one word when twenty would possibly come to mind. Even through English translations like those of J. M. Cohen and Samuel Putnam, we can still see Rabelais wallowing in the vernacular. Now that printing presses reached an ever-widening market of the newly1iterate, the French language offered the novel incentives of money and celebrity. Gargantua and Pantagruel displays the ebullience nike air max classic of a language newly liberated from the academy, and Rabelais himselfis drunk on words. We can imagine that he might have swallowed a French dictionary-if one had been available at the time. But Robert Estienne's pioneer Latin-French dictionary did not appear until 1538. In 1546, twelve years after Gargantua, when Rabelais produced his Third Book, orthodoxy had become more fervent. Only the year before, Walden- sian heretics had been massacred in southeastern France, and in Paris that same year Rabelais's friend Dolet was burned at the stake for heresy. This Third Book, a sequel to the narrative of Pantagruel, is the first to bear Rabelais's name as author and "doctor of medicine." It is more serious than its predecessors, in a Rabelaisian way. Dedicated to a friend of 1iterature, Margaret Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I, it rambles around "The Woman Question" (La Querelle des Femmes), then widely agitated by learned men. Panurge, deciding to marry, consults with theologians, philos- ophers, lawyers, doctors, and miscellaneous divines and diviners. Rabelais precipitately brings Gargantua all grey and purple nike the way back from the afterlife to ha- rangue his son Pantagruel on the importance of parental consent to mar- riage. But the pope had held that parental consent was not required because the sacrament of marriage performed by a priest was enough to join the parties in the eyes of God. Still, Rabelais, along with Erasmus, the Evangeli- cals, and the Protestants, found the need for parental consent in the Old Testament and feared the pope's monopoly over a realm that God had assigned to father and mother. For aristocrats and propertied people in those days marriage was more a political and commercial than an amorous alliance. Fortune-hunters grey and purple nike or romantics could and often did abscond with well-endowed daughters to the ruin of the family estates. Yet the collusion of a priest (as in Romeo's case, with unfortunate consequences) did not prevent noble families from using the law of rape against a suitor who married without parental consent. While Rabelais lets us share Panurge's