Katie’s Reviews > The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais > Status Update

“At that time the activity of men concerned with religious problems and with the means of bringing about a renewal that all recognized as indispensable oscillated between two poles. It moved back and forth between Luther and Erasmus.”

Friends who know more than me about the Reformation: is this a fair assessment of things around 1520? I like the mental image, but I don't want to use it if it's overly simplistic.

"Are we still inclined to believe that 'people of the Middle Ages,' all of them all of the time, were so charitable that they believed absolutely everything? Those poor 'people of the Middle Ages' - what a sad picture has been painted of them for generations. Luckily for them, they never existed."

He was fascinating for allthat, coarse and sensitive,drunk with pride and crazy about music, a remarkable swimmer, quick to cross swords -he was a force of nature, one that was out of control and unsettling. This was the man Christie called the Martyr of the Renaissance and Boulmier the Martyr of Free Thought. First and foremost he was, unquestionably, a martyr to Etienne Dolet himself.