François Rabelais's view of the body and its educational aspect:

Focusing on the change in his focus on physical formation

Abstract

　This paper focuses on François Rabelais (1494?-1553), who was active during the Renaissance period, which marked a turning point in history and attitudes towards physical education. We tried to extract his ideas on physical education from the contents of his work “Gargantua and Pantagruel”. In this paper, as a “viewpoint” for extracting Rabelais's “physical education ideas”, we focused on the relationship between the terms “education” and “body”, which forms the actual element of “physical education”.
　First, we confirmed how Rabelais positions the body, which is the focus in physical education. As a result, the “Second Book”, which is the first part of “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, revealed that he might not have had a positive view of education for the body. An examination of the “First Book”, which was published 2 years after the “Second Book”, revealed that Rabelais treated knowledge education and physical exercise equally, and changes in his physical view were recognized. In the “First Book”, he argued that education of the mind and body at the same time was incompatible. The “First Book” expresses a deeper and clearer description of Rabelais's concept of physical education. Regarding the body as an object to be educated, the contents of play and chivalry education are adopted as the items of physical exercise, and the constituent elements of physical education are confirmed in this scenario.
　Rabelais's ideal educational theory is a method of appealing to human autonomy, and the ideal society appears in the story of “Abbey of Thélème”. Here, it is possible to identify the constituent elements of physical education as “self-education” as a target for autonomous humans to discipline their bodies.