Despite a good deal of excellent work on Rabelais's Tiers Livre in the last thirty years, some of the most fundamental issues of the book have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. The character of Panurge, for example, has been explained in a variety of mutually exclusive ways, all of which are plausible but none of them absolutely compelling. Panurge has been understood as a positive character whose noble quest for an absolute Answer serves to reveal the limits of existing human knowledge, and to expose the vain pretensions of the learned. He has also been understood as precisely the opposite: a negative character whose self-love blinds him to the Evangelical wisdom of characters like Pantagruel and Hippothadée. And most recently he has been understood as neither of these, but rather as a pretext for, and an agent of, Rabelais's own verbal virtuosity, or of a ludic inquiry into the nature of language.

Despite the attention that has been devoted in the last fifty years to Sir Thomas More's account of Richard III, both in terms of texts and interpretation, the difficulties that surround that baffling work continue to perplex and tease the reader—at least this reader. As A. F. Pollard observed in 1933, the problems relating to it are manifold: its authorship, its sources, the date of its composition, the circumstances of its publication, the relation of the English to the Latin versions, the absence of any original autograph, the variations in the printed texts, the motive of its conception, and the reason for its unfinished state and abrupt termination.