The research was being conducted in the context of an unprecedented crisis in language learning in UK schools, which is in turn undermining the health of Modern Languages departments in universities.

The Early Modern French Research Seminar is a termly seminar series devoted to current scholarship in sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century French studies.

Rabelais remains the Renaissance poet of the belly. Pregnancies and births, urination and excretion punctuate the adventures of his giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. His style fits those themes. According to settled views among critics, the Rabelaisian belly and its related style signal either the comic crowning of our lower regions in the upside-down world of carnivalesque fiction, or humanist satire wielded against diseased body-politics: old universities, the Church.