Rabelais in the Whig World: Religious Persecution, Forced Migration and the Politics of Literary Translation in Post-Revolutionary England

Abstract: The commentary that Pierre Antoine Le Motteux (1663-1718) added to the English translations of Rabelais that he issued in 1694, in which he interpreted the comic episodes of Gargantua and Pantagruel as "satirical allegories" on historical events and personalities in sixteenth-century France, has been mocked by commentators from Alexander Pope to Mikhail Bakhtin as a narrow, philistine way to read literature. This article recovers the personal context of religious persecution and forced migration that shaped the approach to reading Rabelais of Motteux, a Huguenot refugee in post-Revolutionary London. It also recovers the public context in which Motteux's translation and commentary were composed and published, relating them to the principles espoused by leading Whig writers, publishers, and politicians. Finally, it is suggested that Motteux's approach to Rabelais as an allegory that can be deciphered with the correct historical "key" influenced notable instances in the eighteenth-century development of English comic fiction, including Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Laurence Sterne's A Political Romance (1759).