Compare and contrast - Baldesar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.

... Baldesar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel are two fundamentally different books. Both texts describe sixteenth century lives in a different manner and both address the issues of love, marriage, sexuality, women's position in society and gender equality. Castiglione uses plain narrative and a series of conversations between his characters to address these subjects while Rabelais uses satire and grotesque and, therefore, his book requires a greater amount of interpretation. Castiglione wrote his book between 1515 and 1528. He intended his book to be read by the aristocracy, which, during the early sixteenth century, was in crisis because of the new politics of the centralization of power. For this reason, his book became a manual for courtiers and court ladies. In The Courtier, the Renaissance notion of individualism is very clear. In addition to Castiglione's image of the ideal courtier, he also tries to present

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