Cloches, torcheculs et pantoufles Copia érasmienne et poétique du mot

The importance of Rabelais’s poetics of amplificatio is generally admitted. This article explores its limits, and the unexpected pertinence afforded by copia, in the sense of Erasmus’s theorization of the latter. For the lexical and morphosyntactic anchoring of this amplificatio in certain passages of Gargantua attests to a systematic labor of variation of the nature and function of words that have become pivots for a conscious rhetoric of its own purposes.